


not really now not anymore

by doctorcolubra



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Anal Sex, Bathroom Sex, But nobody dies I promise, Dirty Talk, Established Relationship, M/M, Major Disaster, Medical Abuse, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Postmodernism, Precognition, Service Kink, Shower Sex, mild gaslighting, past Jared/Gavin, these tags make me look like a bad person, unobtrusive OCs I hope, violence to frogs, warning: gavin belson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-04-20 20:34:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 57,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14269023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorcolubra/pseuds/doctorcolubra
Summary: In the year 2095, on a barely-settled outpost planet, Pied Piper has been struggling to bring its revolutionary precognitive brain implant technology to market.  The process has left Richard vulnerable to seizures and migraines, along with visions of the future that terrify him.  Now, with Jared, he's facing a tiny apocalypse.





	1. sparrow, emerald, submarine

Richard has been lying still for a few minutes, staring blankly at the ceiling—his expression, in another context, would look like boredom. Still blinking. Jared’s hand is resting on his chest, just to be sure. In, out. Richard’s breathing is deep and harsh, rasping through dry lips. The air inside the compound is always parched, because water’s expensive and the atmo controls don’t disperse humidity as well as they should. The kitchens steam while the air in the offices and coding labs is dead, inert, dry as paper. Jared will look into that, when he has time. He doesn’t have a lot of time.

“Can you hear me yet?” Jared murmurs, taking Richard’s hand in his. “Squeeze if you can hear, come on, everything’s okay…”

No return squeeze. You can’t rush this part. Jared glances up at the time, where the Lumen’s projecting it on the wall. A little after nine. Morning. They go by Earth time here, eight hours less than Greenwich Mean, because Perdigon is tide-locked, with the settlement of Bonaventure located in a strip of permanent twilight—nobody can adjust to that. The compound wrangles their circadian rhythms with a system of lights and artificial sounds: weather, birds, traffic. Very few windows. Not much to see out there, anyway.

“Squeeze my hand, Richard,” Jared reminds him, squeezing firmly. “Just once. It’s okay if you can’t, I’m right here.”

The girl outside the door is pacing, her steps a little loud on the tiles, as if she thinks Jared might have forgotten about her but she’s too diffident to ask if everything is all right. She’ll have to wait.

“If you can hear my voice, Richard, just please—”

Richard’s eyelids flutter, exposing white slivers of sclera, and he makes a shapeless, clabbering sound. Like waking from a nightmare. He jerks his hand from Jared’s and turns away, still breathing hard, his cheek on the pillow to face the wall. “They’re just little, you can’t, no…”

Jared doesn’t need to ask what he means; the Lumen’s been set to record the incident, and Richard will listen to it later, taking notes, explaining whatever needs explaining. Sometimes Jared asks him when they’re in bed together: _what was that about, what did you mean?_ Richard might laugh and tell him, or he might be tight-lipped. 

“Richard, do you know where you are?”

“You’re not a bomb,” Richard mumbles into the pillow. That’s what it sounds like, anyway. “You were flowers. But we make them owls. Ark. Ark. You didn’t need to—I can’t put this back together—”

“I need to hear you answer my questions, okay?” Jared says. He wants to keep touching Richard but knows better than to crowd him at moments like this. They’ve discussed it: hands are fine, arms are okay, nothing above the shoulders. Richard punched Jared in the face once when he wasn’t completely conscious yet, but aware enough to feel trapped. Jared understood. “I’ll let you rest in a minute, it’ll be so soon, I promise. Do you know where you are?”

“Home. Work.”

They’re the same thing. “Sure. Can you tell me which room?”

Richard makes a put-upon sound that Jared knows well, a sound that means _I know but I can’t find the words yet._ After a pause, he makes a twisting movement with one hand, miming an old-fashioned water faucet. “Next to.”

“Next to water?”

“To…bathroom.”

“Okay, not bad. What day is it?”

“It’s the end of the world.”

“Well, but the date, though.”

Richard’s frowning, and looks up at the Lumen’s projected display for a clue. That’s okay, he’s allowed clues. “April 27. 2095.”

“Good. You’re doing really well. We’ll do the word test, okay? You know this one. Sparrow, emerald, submarine. I’ll ask you in five minutes if you still remember them.”

Richard grunts his assent, closing his eyes for a few moments. Not opening them, he says, “We could die today.”

“Is that what you saw?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Definitely dying, or just maybe?”

Long pause. “Maybe.”

Sometimes Richard says things like that. Jared would defend their precognition tech in front of God Himself, praising its accuracy and effectiveness, but in everyday life…you can’t take it to heart every single time Richard has a vision of doom. Most days, you can give him an hour or two to get himself together and he’ll admit that the range of possible futures is broad and diverse—death is always at one end of the axis, that’s all. Some mornings, Richard turns his gaze that way and sees too much, but it doesn’t mean catastrophe. It might not even mean bad luck. It just means he’s scared.

“You talked like this the morning we got married, remember?” says Jared with a smile, reaching out now that Richard’s quieter, smoothing his sleep-mussed hair back. “You said I was going to get in an accident.”

“You would have,” Richard mumbles, taking Jared’s other hand in his, exploring the shapes of it with his fingers. “But you dropped your keys. You bent over to pick them up, and you said _butterfingers_ because of course you did. Three seconds. It slowed you down by three seconds. So there was a truck you didn’t hit, because of that. That was the difference between having and losing you.”

“You didn’t lose me, though. And you won’t.” Jared bends over to press a kiss to his temple, where the white vertical scar is almost invisible against Richard’s pale skin. It branches at the tip, like a Y with a long tail. “Will you rest a bit? If you come back to me in an hour and you still say it’s the end of the world, I’ll believe you. Promise. We’ll do whatever you think we need to do. An hour’s okay, right?”

“Yeah.” Richard seems to have lost interest in his own dire prophecy, exhausted from the vision and curling into the foetal position on the cot in the quiet room. “Thanks, babe.”

“What were the words I asked you a few minutes ago?”

“Sparrow. Emerald.” Pause. “Submarine.”

“Perfect.”

Richard makes an ironic little _yay_ gesture, both fists raised to his shoulders, but he smiles back up at Jared. “See, it’s fine.”

“That’s what I was telling _you_ , are you stealing my lines now?” Jared kisses that scar on his temple again, the delicate silk-crepe texture of the tissue just barely perceptible against his lips. “Shruti’s still outside, the girl from Bonaventure. She’s shadowing me today, remember? They say she’s a really good coder so maybe she’ll come work for us when she graduates. That’s where I’ll be, anyhow, just up and down the west corridors to show her around. Should I write that down for you?”

“I can ask the Lumen if I forget, it’s fine,” says Richard, and he smiles. “Go woo the coders.”

Jared smiles back, draws the folded quilt up over Richard’s shoulders, and goes to the bathroom next door. Richard’s water-bottle is waiting at the filling station, sterilised and purified, so Jared takes it back to him. “Drink before you drift off again, okay? You’re dehydrated.”

Richard chugs from the water bottle without argument, closing the cap and settling down again with the half-full bottle nestled next to his pillow. The path from the bed to the bathroom door is clear; sometimes he stumbles over obstacles, unable to navigate, but he’ll be safe today.

“Okay, Lumen, set alarm for one hour from now,” Jared says, and the Lumen chirps obediently, powering its soft lights down to a dim pink glow. Richard hates the thing; it’s Hooli tech, but Jared finds it useful even so. It’s hard to force himself to leave, but he does, closing the door softly behind him.

The girl in the hallway is still waiting, arms folded, looking down at her shoes. “Sorry, sorry, you don’t have time to be dealing with this today—”

“Oh, that’s not a problem at all,” says Jared, turning to lead her down the corridor. “Please, don’t apologise. Richard has an early form of the precog tech—the surgery to implant the original prototype was quite invasive. Our current beta users have a much gentler experience. No incisions, no recovery time.”

“They let me try it out in the main lab. I didn’t feel anything, though.”

“With the ear canal model?” It’s the size of a grain of rice, imperceptible once it’s in place, quietly stimulating the brain without causing reactions like Richard’s. Sometimes without the visions, too. “We’ve had problems with that one, to be honest. The form factor is great and don’t get me wrong, we love that it doesn’t seem to have any detrimental neural effects. But it doesn’t work the way Richard envisioned.”

“Sounds like you’re still a long way from going to market,” Shruti says. She’s small and polite but sharp, a papercut of a girl. “If the only functioning prototype takes a user down at the knees like that.”

“Well…” Jared pauses unnecessarily by a breakroom, wandering inside to show her the vending machines, the communal fridge. She’s already seen that stuff. “The tech was based on Richard’s unique neurological topography. He sees these things with or without it. The original implants stimulated natural structures that he was born with—often to a dangerous degree. The prototype in his head isn’t fit to be sold, of course, but it’s still transmitting usable data, and the declawed version needs that data to model his neural firing patterns. Which we’re still learning about. We’re extremely close, and miles ahead of the rest. Hooli couldn’t even match our weakest prototype, let alone the newer versions that our designers are cooking up.”

“What if you can’t reproduce what’s in his brain?” asks Shruti, lingering by the door. “Or what if the cost is prohibitive?”

“We’re very confident. Our research team is the best in the business, and they know how important this is. Let’s…let’s move on,” says Jared, leading her down the hall.

The main workroom is like a coffee-shop, with clusters of big tables for groups and booths for partners, a few solo coders spread out by the windows. The view outside is flat and grey—this land used to be a vast freshwater sea, millions of years ago, and now it’s a cold, froggy marsh. Muddy, still water and rosy-purple reeds. Perdigon’s first settlers introduced frogs as an ill-thought eco-experiment, and now the situation is positively Biblical outside the habitation barriers.

So it’s not beautiful, but the light is real: pale, dim light from a little sun, filtered through the thick, smoky glass of the windows—the sun shines a dull red outside. Habitat experts say that settlers get desperate and aggressive when exposed to red light for too long.

Jared’s absent-mindedly rattling through all these benefits and drawbacks as he talks to Shruti, selling Pied Piper as best he can, but with half his mind still on Richard. “Commercial real estate’s a steal out here,” he says, hoping that he sounds convincing as he moves on with Shruti towards the projection rooms. “Lots of valuable startups choose to build facilities on small planets and planetoids. Transport and food costs go up, but we own the buildings and the land outright, cash on the nail. No rent, no taxes, lenient corporate regulations, lots of office space—as much as we can build, practically. It’s a huge advantage.”

Shruti raises her eyebrows with a crooked smile. “But you’re on Perdigon.”

“We hope we’re making Perdigon an even better place to live,” Jared says diplomatically. “Lots of colonists really appreciate the amenities we offer. Our entertainment centres are open to locals who aren’t employees, and we’ll be doing the same with our school and daycare. Which are going to be top-notch, the kids will get an amazing level of personal attention.”

“You’re from Bonaventure too, though, right?” says Shruti. “You must’ve gone to Urban V.”

“One of my foster families brought me here to Bonaventure, yeah.” Jared doesn’t want to sound ungracious; the colony of Bonaventure is tiny, and word travels quickly back to the administration. It’s one of the things he doesn’t like about the place. You can’t even have an opinion. “So I went to Urban V—it’s a good little school for its size.”

“Didn’t you want to get away?”

“I did, though,” says Jared, unable to keep from smiling. “I got to have my time seeing the sights on Earth, which was a dream come true, but when I joined the Pied Piper team I knew how much they could save by putting down roots here. And I knew how important it was to offer great educational options for employees. We’ve got the cream of the crop on our staff and we want to keep them happy.”

“Do people leave a lot?” asks Shruti.

“Our retention rate’s 8% above average.”

“Huh.” She sounds sceptical, but she’s already moving on toward the next room. “What do you guys think about Founder Syndrome? What happens after Richard Hendricks?”

“We’ve certainly given Founder Syndrome its due consideration,” says Jared, who just finished _Funeral Games_ on his tablet last night, crying himself to sleep under Richard’s tolerant arm. “But we have such a deep bench of talent, I’m sure our successors will be Octavians rather than Pompey the Greats.”

Jared’s phone vibrates gently in his pocket, and he taps the screen on. Text from Richard: _Focus groups still hate the slogan._

 

Richard’s been jolted out of a sound sleep by the meeting notification—the testers finished early and came bustling right up to the admin floor to give him the news. Probably thinking that it made them seem extra productive. Richard has splashed some water on his face and knocked back a few caffeine tablets, and he doesn’t need Jared around to deal with this. It’s still his company.

“What we’re seeing across the board is that our testers did not like the slogan,” says the guy with the beard. Beard guy. What’s his name? Richard’s heard the names of each random tester multiple times now, _Alan Lisa Josh Jana Katie Ramon_ , _sparrow emerald submarine_ , but he’s lost the expert’s name. “They felt it was ‘ominous.’”

“It’s not—how can it be ominous?” says Richard, rubbing his face. “It’s the opposite. I thought you were gonna come in here and tell me the slogan’s too boring. We were trying to make it boring for you, because, because last time you told us people think our tech is creepy.”

“Our testers did not find this slogan boring. Alan said that it made him ‘want to take a sledgehammer to all my tech and go live in the woods,’” Beard Guy says, reading aloud from his notes. “Ramon described it as ‘sinister.’ Jana was the first to mention the word ‘ominous’, and all the members of the group raised their hands when asked if they agreed.” 

“That just seems…really exaggerated,” Richard says, arms folded. “‘Pied Piper, we know where you’re going next,’ like c’mon, that’s a bland slogan. That’s like something Hooli would squeeze out.”

“Our testers did not rate Pied Piper’s slogan at a similar level of reliability when compared with Hooli’s marketing campaigns,” says Beard Guy. Tom? Thom? Richard thinks he remembers an extraneous H. “Pied Piper also scored low on scales of warmth, positivity, and wholesomeness.”

“You can’t measure wholesomeness.”

“We can measure whether people think something is wholesome.”

“Right, okay,” Richard says, because he can’t argue philosophy right now. A thin seam of pain has opened up inside his skull. “Dude, I don’t know, I thought it was fine. ‘Going next’, like…the future! Right? Going next?”

“Those two words did test quite positively, both individually and as a gerundive phrase,” says Thom. “The panel was less positive about ‘know’, ‘where’, ‘we’, and ‘you’re’, in order from most to least ominous.”

“What if we cut the slogan down to just that, then? Or wait, is it better as a question? ‘Where are you going next?’ But like, put emphasis on ‘you,’” says Richard, underlining the word in the air with his hand as he swivels restlessly in the chair. “Doesn’t that…give them more agency or something?”

“We can certainly run another test, if that’s what you want to do,” Thom says, and it’s impossible to tell from his tone whether that’s a good idea or not. “And if your marketing team agrees.”

Cart before the horse, okay. “Fine, whatever, we’ll do that,” says Richard, whose head has started to pound. Lightning like a hairline fracture in his visual field, crackling white. “I’ll talk to marketing, I mean. Thanks—thank you, tell your team we said…um, we said good job. Go team.”

Thom gives a courtly little bow, apparently not detecting any of Richard’s distress whatsoever, and leaves the meeting room. Richard wants to find Jared, but walking seems dangerous. He curls up on the floor instead, waiting for the pain to pass.

 _“Looks like you’re sitting on the floor,”_ says the Lumen’s artificial voice. Gavin Belson hired a whole blockbuster’s worth of Hollywood talent to come up with the character of “Gavin Belson” that would provide the Lumen’s voice, and they seem to have picked up on every irritating smug cadence he has. And it’s everywhere in the compound, running their life support systems and picking up on changes in Richard’s movements, which is apparently for accessibility. _“Do you need help getting up? We can notify someone.”_

“No, thanks. Um, location of Jared Dunn?”

 _“Jared’s in corridor B,”_ Gavin’s voice says. “Do you want me to call him to this room?”

“No. Turn off Service Alerts for this room.” Richard stops fighting gravity and stretches out flat on the carpet. Feels good. It’s the end of the world.

 

Jared takes Shruti to one of the projection rooms—they have some recruitment videos that she dryly refers to as ‘propaganda’, although he hopes she’ll change her mind. 

The videos do their best to suggest a joyful, fulfilled life working for Pied Pier in beautiful Bonaventure, Perdigon. But after the first ten minutes, they cut to raw lab footage of Richard after surgery. It’s not easy to watch; Richard is bleary, half his head shaved, and his face is too thin, his high-prowed nose looking like the proboscis of a strange bird. The hospital gown hangs off his narrow shoulders.

The operators deal out the Zener cards, facedown, then turn them up one by one. Each has a simple ideogram: circle, square, star, waves, cross. “Which one is next?”

Richard doesn’t hesitate, or even look up. “Waves.”

“Correct. Which one is next?”

“Cross.”

“Correct. Which one is next?”

“Circle.”

“Correct. Which one is next?”

It goes on and on, a full brace of forty questions, but it’s over soon: Richard doesn’t hesitate, and he doesn’t miss. Not a single one.

But this doesn’t prove precognition, necessarily. Remote viewing, maybe, an ability to see each card even when they’re facedown in a shuffled deck. For the next round of tests, Richard names the symbol first and then waits while a machine shuffles the deck three times. The machine whirs and Richard slides back in his chair, angling his long chin up at the ceiling. Off-camera, Jared’s voice: “Are you okay?”

“Fine. Bored.”

So that was Richard’s only comment on making history, at the time: _fine, bored._ Jared knows better—that performance of elaborate unconcern was Richard at his most flamboyant. _He wasn’t even nervous,_ Jared had said later to Dinesh. _That wasn’t guessing, it wasn’t luck. He knew._

Dinesh and Gilfoyle are there in the archival footage too, and the camera does a dramatic Ken Burns pan from one to the other. _“But there were more changes in store for Pied Piper…”_

“Is that Dinesh Chugtai?” says Shruti, glancing across at Jared in the flickering light of the projection room. “He used to work here?”

“Well, not _here_ ,” says Jared. “Pied Piper was still based in offices on Earth then. They were more interested in machine learning and neural networking so they went their own way.”

The camera lingers on Gilfoyle’s face; as usual, he doesn’t look like he wants to be filmed, eyeing the lens coldly over one shoulder as he works, wrist deep in cables and clusters. _First there was Anton,_ the presenter intones. _Then there was Aleister. Today, we know the first true machine intelligence as Ahriman. But the revolution started here at Pied Piper, where innovation is second nature—_

A scuffle in the hall. The doors of the projection room bang open, fluorescent light flooding in. Richard’s feet skid on the tiles. “Jared—fucking Jesus Christ, thank God, Jared—”

Jared’s stomach drops. “Richard, are you—”

“No.” He’s drenched with sweat, chalky, and grabs a fistful of Jared’s shirt, trying to pull him out of his seat. “We have to go—you too,” Richard says to Shruti, looking like he’s forgotten her name. “Come on, come on, pull the fucking—not the fire alarm, goddammit, everyone will try to go outside—”

“What’s going on, what’s happening?”

“Now, _please,_ now.” Richard’s voice cracks, and his eyes are leaking tears. In spite of his pallor, he’s radiating heat, his fist still balled in Jared’s shirt, pulling him toward the door. He grabs Shruti’s hand too, forgetting his usual aversion to touching strangers skin-to-skin. “Everybody, right the fuck now, everybody goes to the basement.”

Jared reaches the door and although he still doesn’t know what’s happening, suddenly he understands. The corridor is full of children. _It’s the end of the world._ They have to go underground.

At the emergency stairwell, Richard slams his palms impatiently on the wall, yelling at the Lumen. “You can fucking notify people _now_ , Gavin, you piece of shit—mass announcement, every room, no exceptions, interrupt all projections, streams, and broadcasts. Message: everyone get to the basement. Now. I don’t care what you’re doing, go.”

The message echoes through the hallways and the other rooms, delivered in real time, in Richard’s own crazed and breathless voice. In this one corridor, Gavin speaks above it: “Just a reminder. Pied Piper Headquarters basement levels are not intended for—”

“Don’t you give me any fire code bullshit right now. Loop announcement. Jared, please go, please go as far down as you can get,” Richard begs him. “Kids, follow Jared, he’s…tall, you can…go, just go.”

“What about you?” Jared’s not letting go of him, trying to physically drag him towards the stairwell. The Lumen’s announcement is echoing through the halls and he can hear the rising murmur of a frightened crowd. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be down there in a minute.”

“But what _is_ it, an earthquake, nukes, what?”

“Yeah, just pretend one of those,” Richard says, jerking away although he’s moving unsteadily, listing to one side. “I have to get something.”

“Richard, _no_ ,” Jared says, wild now, seeing what kind of grief is now about to befall him. “If you go I’ll never see you again—”

“No. I don’t die this way.” It’s an icy, distant confidence that possesses Richard sometimes, before which Jared feels accidental and insignificant, and it’s not the last he wants to see of his husband. But somewhere in the welter of panic, Jared still feels relieved.

Because the big joke’s over. There is no comfort and there is no happy ending, and once again, Donald Dunn is running for his life. Everything’s back to normal.

Jared lets go of Richard and begins a headcount of the kids as they go past him, down the staircase. He knows their names, because there aren’t that many this time of year. Pied Piper’s new in-house education program is a good one, but Urban V is still the school that everyone around here goes to. There are eleven children, and Shruti, who’s only nineteen. They’re more important than Richard, and they’re much, much more important than Jared.

Three minutes later, hurrying down a cement corridor in Pied Piper’s underground parking lot, everyone feels the impact. The first rumble and shudder makes Jared think of minor earthquakes back in California, but thirty seconds later there’s another one and it’s bigger, not smaller. Hundreds of car alarms go off, the cars bouncing and skittering on their tires, shaken around like toys. Jared and the kids are behind a cement barrier, and he’s huddled against the wall with his arms around everyone he can reach, braced for it. _Everyone curl up in a ball like this, protect your heads, that’s good._ If the structure won’t hold then they’re dead, they’ll be buried alive.

The alarms are blaring, but the planet is still. The youngest is wailing, lodged somewhere under Jared’s left armpit, but the other kids are waiting speechless for whatever’s coming next. Ten feet above them, Jared hears the metal door bang open on the upper ramp, the familiar sound of Richard’s stride. “Jared!”

“Here.” He can hardly make himself heard above the car alarms, throat dry and thick. Seconds later, there’s a roar above-ground like a train passing close, and the ringing of glass shattering all over the compound.

Richard crawls to shelter with the kids under Jared’s arms, all of them curled tight in this cement crevice of the parking garage. The lights flicker, and every car alarm goes dead.

“Richard,” Jared murmurs in the close space, “what’s happening?”

“A heavyweight cargoliner,” Richard says. He swallows. “Called the _Handsome Lake_. Crashed twenty miles from here, in the middle of West Bonaventure. There’s nothing left. Of anything.”

He sounds nauseated, and Jared feels it too. One of the older kids asks, “Shouldn’t we go somewhere?”

Richard answers first. “No.”

“We have to get these kids to their parents,” says Jared.

“The tunnels are two minutes from caving in,” Richard says flatly. “They weren’t built to these specs. Anyone who’s not in the garage right now, you won’t see them.”

“Richard,” Jared whispers. It’s rare to get him to coat these pronouncements with even the smallest amount of tact. And Jared knows that the only way you get through something like this is with a little benign delusion. “Everyone’s going to be okay. Aren’t we?”

Richard licks his lips. He’s been crying, although Jared can only tell from the sound of his breath. “Yeah. Of course we are. Of course.”


	2. at swim-two-birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Midrashim. Richard has been with Jared long enough to be at the height of his sexual awakening.

No one can say much, the first night.

There’s no heat in the parking garage. Jared, Richard and the kids are bundled up in other people’s coats, just like the kids in the Narnia books, which Jared describes for them from his own scrambled recollections, changing the parts he doesn’t like. He could never turn Queen Susan the Gentle away from Aslan’s Country. Every car in the parking lot was jolted from its original position and many of the windows were shattered, so Jared has been crawling across the crumbled metal hoods and roofs to look for backseat treasure: coats, food, useful junk, crowbars and ice scrapers, maps, food, food, food. 

On the second night, Jared tells them this story:

“The real Pied Piper was a man from medieval Germany, whose given name has been lost to history. Lots of very important people have had names lost to history, if you think about it, so it’s not so bad when someone forgets your name. You’re in good company! This man didn’t have anything to do with pie, the dessert. Rather, this is the adjective ‘pied’ meaning variegated in colour. This word comes from the word ‘magpie’, a tiny yet bold bird native to Eurasia on Earth. They don’t live here. 

“Now, the magpie had dashing black and white plumage, like a handsome man in a tuxedo, and his cry was a choking chatter, _chak-chak-chak-chak_ , like that. Like a person with an annoying laugh, but, you know, lovable nonetheless. So people thought of magpies as being very talkative, and associated his sweet, annoying laugh as being like the idle chatter of a woman—blatant misogyny. And even though the timeless elegance of the black and white plumage is _the very same_ for both the male and the female of the species, people started to call the bird “Magoty-Pie”—Magot being a familiar form of the name Margaret, which was very common at the time. You know, the magpie would be singing his little heart out in the morning, full of the joy of life, and some medieval lout would stick his head out the window and yell, ‘hey, Magoty-sweetie, Magoty-pie, shut up and let me go back to sleep,’ like they would to a local woman, and they thought this was funny because misogyny is deeply corrosive to the human spirit, both for the oppressor and the oppressed. 

“But even though his name was just a mean phrase that somebody yelled at him once, the noble magpie’s natural beauty became known far and wide. Anything that was black and white, medieval people thought of magpies. Incredible branding. Black and white horses were called piebald. Even one of the most incredible birds in the world, the bald eagle, derives _his_ name from that very word ‘piebald’, a word which answers to the desk of the magpie. It’s an incredible tale of a strong but vulnerable creature becoming world-famous through his ability to capture people’s hearts. 

“The Pied Piper of Hamelin, therefore, was a flamboyantly dressed ratcatcher, who wore black and white like a magpie, perhaps to get attention for his itinerant profession. As for piping, that was part of his act, playing the flute to charm animals before leading them to their demise. Whether this con was actually effective vermin control is anybody’s guess, but the citizens of Hameln, a town in Lower Saxony, refused to pay for this dubious service; to wit, a disputed sum of fifty guilders. The Pied Piper used his eerie gift on the flute, like a Yusef Lateef or a Néstor Torres, to charm the town’s children, luring them away from their homes and their families to a cave. No one knows what became of the children, but they were never seen again. It was a terrible tragedy.”

Shruti lifts her head from her pile of coats. “Why’d he name his company after a child murderer?”

“I don’t know, I never quite understood his metaphor,” says Jared, who’s exhausted. “You’ll have to ask Richard. Goodnight, kids. Sweet dreams.”

He’s asked the kids what their parents used to do for them before bed, and has been careful not to exactly copy anyone’s special ritual; he wouldn’t want it to feel like a cruel mockery. But he kisses the ones on the forehead who had bedtime kisses on the cheek, and pats the hands of the ones who used to have shoulder-pats. There are eleven configurations of this and Jared remembers each one—how could he forget? And then there is his adult-level goodnight to Shruti. But it doesn’t satisfy him to have told such an incomplete story to the kids—they deserve whatever closure they can get these days. The next night he puts Richard in charge. “Tell them about the Pied Piper.”

So on the third night, Richard tells the story:

“Okay, well…I mean, c’mon. It’s a classic fable. A timeless…well, see, it’s _not_ a fairy-tale. That’s actually the coolest thing about it! This is something that really happened, on June 26th in the year 1284. Right? Amazing! Now, the Pied Piper was a musician, right? Like a street musician, but he also did magic tricks, like with the rats. He was an independent artist! He had a look going for him, and he had a great name that people called his act—the Pied Piper—and he was doing a great job keeping the town free of rats. And _then_ , then it says the _citizens_ of the town, the ordinary consumers who were benefiting from his hard work, _they_ didn’t want to pay for it. Can you believe that, kids? They’d agreed on a thousand guilders, but the Pied Piper, who just wanted to get his work out there, he even agreed to reduce the price to fifty. But they still didn’t want to pay! They just wanted to have a great time without supporting the people who made it all possible. So, you know, it was a labour dispute. They didn’t want to pay the piper—like, right there, common adage! People say it all the time. 

“So the Pied Piper was smart, and he knew how to get back at them. They had taken his artistic creations, his children, if you will, and so he took theirs. That way they’d understand what it was like to love something and put so much time and care into developing it and making it perfect, and putting up with it through all the hard times and the scary moments, until finally it’s ready to go out to the world—and, and somebody just takes that away. Right? The story does _not_ say he murdered the kids, okay, and neither does the town register. That is very much in dispute. The register said, ‘it is one hundred years since our children left.’ Who knows, maybe they were fine. Maybe they all left town because they knew that they’d never be able to get a fair wage there, when it was time for them to start working. Like, think about it! One theory is that they left on a Children’s Crusade, but that—ha, well, that’s a story for another night, kids.”

“Babe, no, I don’t think so,” says Jared. “I’m sure you think it’s empowering but it’s really not.”

“I still don’t get what the Pied Piper has to do with telling the future,” says Marcello, who’s eleven.

“Oh, it doesn’t,” Richard tells him. “We used to be a music rights management company. It all operated on an estimated value widget that predicted the markets based on data I provided to an algorithm, which used the song’s current and projected popularity to assess how much the artist could charge. So they could tell if something was gonna be a hit. It was really gonna change everything in the music business, but someone found out that the code itself wasn’t what was predicting the markets, and after that it all got kinda weird. But it’s a really important issue! Artists deserve fair compensation, kids.”

“That’s a good moral,” Jared says, smiling. Richard is better at this than he thinks he is, when he’s relaxed and when he’s engaged with what he’s talking about. “Goodnight, kids. Sweet dreams.” 

 

On the fourth night, Richard’s gone scavenging and Jared’s alone. They’re desperately hungry. 

Water is no problem—there are machines everywhere which Jared nicknames Miriam’s Wells, because they’re never far away. You just have to push them over, a dangerous pursuit, but Donald Dunn used to get food and water that way during the weeks he was left behind as a child at the abandoned mall in Rapid City. He won’t teach the kids because they could be crushed if they don’t get out of the way in time, but he’s always had good reflexes.

“You’ve got each other for heat,” he tells them. “Everybody stay close.”

“I can’t sleep,” whispers the youngest, Laura.

“Try having some more water, honey.” It will make her feel a little more full. “And just lie still. It’s good for your body to rest, even if you can’t sleep.”

“Richard’s not back yet.”

“I know, sweetheart. But he will be.”

 

Richard’s back in an hour, wild, with rain in his hair. Face flushed, he presses cold palms to Jared’s cheeks and kisses him. “I got outside,” he whispers, in the light of an employee’s emergency flashlight that they found in one of the abandoned cars. “Over the pile of rubble in the north tunnel, there’s a gap, you can squeeze through. We can, I mean. Skinny guys take over the world, right? And then the stairs are clear and you come out in the outdoor lot—more cars we can loot. Half the buildings are down, just shells.”

Jared holds him close, cheek pressed to his hair. “You were gone a long time.”

“There’s some food, come up with me to help carry it down.”

Jared nods and goes to tell Shruti: _Richard found stuff to eat for tomorrow, you’re in charge till we get back, it won’t be more than an hour._ He touches wood as he says it, a parking barrier that they’ve dragged into place that’s doing the symbolic work of a wall. Everyone’s uneasy with sleeping in the vast dark space of the parking garage, even though Richard has told them that there aren’t any monsters to worry about, human or otherwise. He says they’re alone.

The two of them scramble over the rubble pile of broken concrete in the north tunnel, grabbing onto the spikes of twisted rebar and trying not to gouge themselves with it. It’s a high climb, eight feet at the peak, with perhaps eighteen inches of clearance between the top of the pile and the ceiling. Richard squeezes through first and then he’s there to pull Jared through, gripping his forearms, until Jared’s hips are over the top and both of them tumble down the north face of the pile to the concrete floor on the other side.

“We gotta disassemble that thing somehow,” Richard says, rolling back over onto his hands and knees as he gets his breath back. “The kids’d hurt themselves.”

“When everyone’s awake,” Jared agrees, because there’s no morning or evening on Perdigon when the power’s out. He feels bruised, but there’s cold air blowing from somewhere nearby, and he gets up with Richard to find its source. 

Ahead of them is a staircase leading to a door propped open with a saltbox, a rectangle of shifting, coloured light above them. Richard takes Jared’s hand to lead him up, and they emerge into something Jared’s never seen before.

The sky is aglow. The dim red sun is in its accustomed place on the horizon, but the northern lights arc overhead, shimmering fields of pale jade green in the deep twilight blue. Their movement reminds Jared of the sheer curtains on the sunroom door at home, his mother’s house in California. He used to lie there on the carpet as a kid, half-asleep on a summer night, trying to catch the breeze. Soft, sweeping in and then billowing out and snapping like a sail, hypnotic. 

Bonaventure’s climate is cold, but it’s still halfway from the equator of Perdigon’s small strip of habitable land. There are no auroras here. “What is it?” Jared whispers, not taking his eyes off the sky.

“The _Handsome Lake_ ’s engines exploded in orbit,” Richard whispers back. Clouds scud across the lights, mackerel scales, and the wind smells like rain and swamp gas. “High-intensity gamma rays and X-rays. Charged particles interact with the magnetosphere, moving in the solar wind, and we get auroras. Bigger and brighter than the natural kind, we’ll be looking at these for days.”

“But we felt the impact down here. Wouldn’t the ship just be vaporised by something like that?”

Richard shakes his head, looking up at the display. “Warp core’s too high-density and it’s lead-shielded. There’s no shockwave in space, no fireball like you’d get planetside, hardly even any debris from the blast. Some of the ship did break apart and burn up in the atmosphere, but the piece that fell was still the size of the Apophis asteroid. Luckily the rest of the planet doesn’t have any human settlements, I guess.”

Jared’s foster parents have smacked all the profanity out of him over the years, and to take it up now would sound affected, he thinks. Which leaves him at a loss for words when he hears Richard say things like that. “Then…then…well, people will know right away that something terrible happened. They’ll _see_ , it’s literally visible from space.”

“They’ll figure it out,” Richard says tightly, moving to climb over one of the wrecked cars in the ground-level parking lot around them. “We can’t send a distress beacon or anything, all our tech is fried. Orbital nuclear explosions cause EMPs.”

They’ve been speculating about that since the first day, once everyone discovered that their phones wouldn’t turn on. Life support systems are protected by generators and Faraday cages, but everything else is vulnerable. 

_—What about your implant?_ Jared asked Richard, the first night.

_—It’s sealed in a metal casing under the plastic, remember? Surgical steel. That’s a Faraday cage._

And God, Jared had been so happy. Maybe that’s sick; the implant hurts Richard every time it’s activated. But for Richard to lose it now…it would be a form of blindness for him. Jared cannot begrudge him his sight. Even when he wants to argue with those visions, to beg for reprieve like Abraham.

“What if…no, Richard, come on. The hospital will have all its transmitters shielded from something like this. They have to make interplanetary calls all the time, they’d be prepared for disasters. We can go break in there—”

“We should probably try there anyway,” Richard says. He’s clambering over the wrecks and Jared is following. “If it even still exists. But a transmitter won’t help, Jared, the satellites are—they’re not _all_ dead, but all the comm satellites are either bricked or they’ll be dead in a few days from power loss.”

“The abbey has an ansible.”

“Seriously?”

Jared hears a note of hope in Richard’s voice for the first time, which makes his heart beat faster. “They do! It’s paired with a device in Rome,” he says, following Richard through the parking lot to what must be their destination, a food-delivery truck. “Officially, it’s not for public use, it’s a museum piece. When the colony was founded in the ’70s, people would send everything to Earth through the abbey’s ansible—news, memes, personal messages for family members, purchase requests, intentions for the Pope, all kinds of things. My teacher in sixth grade used to let me copy-edit our class’s requests, if I’d been good that week.”

Richard’s standing on top of a crumpled sedan, his crowbar hanging forgotten from one hand, staring down at Jared. “Are you fucking kidding me right now with—”

He loses his footing and skids off the car, Jared barely catching him in time. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I picked a bad moment,” Jared says, helping him upright again. “We don’t even know if the abbey’s still standing.”

Richard won’t let him go without a kiss, his hands in Jared’s collar. His elation from before has returned. “No! We do! Come up with me, come up, look…”

They both get up on top of a utility vehicle whose surface is a little steadier, and Richard points to something on the horizon. Jared has to squint, because the skyline of Bonaventure is unrecognisable now, shrouded in dirty fog on the horizon, all the landmarks gone. But… “The bell tower—”

“Right?”

“That’s the bell tower, that’s St. Columban's.” Jared’s laughing with relief, his arms around Richard. The steeple is limned against the shifting green light of the sky. “If we get there, if we can make the ansible work, someone will come for us—won’t they? You’re smiling, we must be okay—”

“No, no, don’t…assume,” Richard says, resting his forehead on Jared’s chest for a moment. “I haven’t seen that far, don’t go by me. And—and someone would notice that the _Handsome Lake_ ’s not meeting up at its rendezvous point, right?”

That’s a business question rather than a science question, so now it’s Jared’s turn to hesitate. “The ship was just departing Bonaventure, though, wasn’t it? Not arriving? If it crashed near the West End, where the landing base is…”

“Yeah.”

“Then I don’t think anyone would have expected a communication from the crew for a month or so. Long-haul cargoliners don’t check in often until they’re at a refueling point. The nearest one’s on Nephele.”

“Okay. Okay, well, that’s fine, that’s…whatever, because we’ll be talking to Rome in a couple of days,” Richard says, reassuring himself, dismounting from the utility vehicle’s rear bumper to head for the delivery truck. “Saying…fuckin’… _arrivederci_ to this dumb rock…”

“Maybe it’ll even be sooner. Some people must have survived in the town, maybe even the monks—one of them would have gone to use the ansible right away.”

Richard’s jimmying the doors of the delivery truck with the crowbar, trying to find purchase for the thin chisel end. “Jared…we gotta…I don’t _like_ having to say this stuff, okay, but we have to prepare the kids for finding bodies. I sure as fuck don’t know how, but we do. Or leave them here while we check the abbey alone and come back to them, one or the other.”

“I think I need to know what you saw and what you didn’t see.”

“It won’t help.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Richard’s hands fall still, though he doesn’t look up from his work. “There was a fireball spanning from Jeanne D’Arc to Porete Street. There’s a crater the depth of the Burj Khalifa that’s taken out most of the human habitation on this planet. We’re a firefly clipped in the headlights. The fact that the abbey tower is still there at all…unbelievable, I would’ve thought the earthquake…but the East End’s further away from the impact site. Bonaventure’s life support functions are all—”

“They’re controlled by the power plant,” Jared finishes, because he sees it too, now. “Which would’ve been…”

“Flattened.”

“We’ll need suits to explore the abbey, then.” It’s faint; Jared’s mind is elsewhere. Stuck on the thought that there might have been survivors in the ruins of Bonaventure who just slowly suffocated as their clean air ran out over the first two days of the disaster. Perdigon does have an atmosphere, but outside of controlled environments like the compound or Bonaventure town, the marsh gases are frequently toxic. Constant recirculation and filtering of the air is necessary; on Perdigon, even when life support’s functioning as intended, you get nosebleeds in your sleep from the parched and over-filtered air. “We’ll need…no, we shouldn’t bring the kids, but…”

“Maybe they should see it,” said Richard, prying the doors again. “Closure. Or something.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Richard.”

“They won’t believe it if I just tell them.”

“No. But seeing it is worse,” says Jared, sitting down for a moment on the bumper of the car next to the delivery truck, watching the auroras in the sky. “An expected death, a normal death with a coffin and a funeral, yes. It’s good for a kid to look and see that it’s really happened. That something’s really gone from the body, that the body’s only a shell. But that’s not what the kids will see in Bonaventure, if they go. It won’t be…orderly.”

Richard nods, not answering right away, and finally the lock splits and the doors crack open. It’s beautiful. Flats of water bottles, lab-grown beef in pristine sealed packages, crates of ship-grown potatoes, huge bales of dry pasta and oats and flour, the Brand X cereal that Pied Piper’s cafeteria always had in stock, powdered milk, freeze-dried vegetable packets.

“I think it’d be worse to make them wait for us,” Richard says finally, climbing into the truck to find something he can eat without prep. The dry puffed rice will do, so he pulls open the plastic to make a mouse-hole and takes one of the smaller bags out. “Letting them wonder all that time. And it’s so much pressure on Shruti.”

“That’s true.” Jared climbs in after him. The enormous bag of cheap pasta feels soft to sit on, luxurious. “Maybe we should sleep in here,” he says, half-serious. “It’s so comfy. No, you’re right, I don’t want anyone to feel abandoned. Or risk getting separated. It’s a long way from here to St. Columban's, I don’t even think we could do it in a day. On foot. But just…remember that we’re asking a lot from them.”

“I know,” says Richard. “We can sleep in here if you want. If we close the door again to keep the swamp gas out.”

“Are we worried about fallout?”

“No. Most of the radiation is dispersed in space, and some’s gonna settle into a belt around the planet, in the magnetosphere. Like when dirt gets trapped behind the fridge, it’s still there but it doesn’t really make the rest of the house gross.”

“I’m not sure I agree. But okay, that’s good.” Jared feels guilty about eating when the kids haven’t had theirs yet, but he’s so hungry that he ploughs through some handfuls of the cereal first. He can feel his salivary glands tingling at the corners of his jaw. They’ll need all this food if they’re going to walk to St. Columban's. “We couldn’t actually drive this thing, could we?”

“Roads are a mess.”

Doubtful that they could even escape the scrambled labyrinth of the parking lot in a four-wheeled vehicle, frankly, but Jared believes in hope. “What about the Green Bikes?”

This is a program that Pied Piper put in place at Jared’s request, free bikes for employees to use around the compound in order to minimise car usage, exhaust, and carbon footprints. Richard looks up sharply. “They'd—wait, you're right, they have those baskets and child seats on them. That could work. It's still a long ride but—can the tires handle broken glass?”

“They’re thick-walled Kevlar mountain bike tires," says Jared, who knows his program. "Because we determined that maintenance costs for road bike tires and inner tubes would be prohibitive, due to their fragility.”

Richard lets out a sound of pure relief that sounds like a sob, and when Jared hears it he knows they’re saved. “Prohibitive. God. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

They’re kissing again, and suddenly—

Richard is always sudden. 

He doesn’t make eyes over the dinner table, the way Jared does. Richard needs little entertainment, other than music, and the music he likes is undanceable. No wandering hands when they’re together on the couch at night. Jared reads on his tablet or watches movies, but Richard is only physically present, staring at nothing…even before the surgery, he was someone who took long journeys in his head. _My space cadet,_ Jared always says, when Richard emerges from these trances and comes to bed. _My Yuri Gagarin, so handsome, he landed in the potato field and the village girls found him..._

Richard doesn’t flirt, in short, and instead will simply begin it all at once in some moment that seems to him like the right one. If he wants you at all, he wants you all at once. Like the sudden bright plummet of a kingfisher.

So in a moment something shifts and Richard’s hand is searching Jared’s fly for his zipper. Quick, urgent, clumsy. “Keep talking to me,” Jared whispers to him, because sometimes he feels alone when people are touching him. “Keep talking to me.”

“I hate your zipper, I hate your belt,” Richard murmurs, kneeling down in front of him, uncomfortably cramped between some pallets of water bottles. As he pulls Jared’s trousers down over his hips, he rubs Jared’s cock through his underwear, flashing a grin. “Jared likes the dirty talk,” he chants in the universal taunting melody. “Jared likes the dirty talk…”

“I just like to hear _you_ talk, it’s intimate, I did not say dirty talk—”

“Jared Dunn likes dirty talk. That’s going in the _papers_ tomorrow, you know that? You like dirty talk so much, I’m just gonna tell everyone what kind of shit you’re into,” Richard tells him, widening his eyes, faux-salacious. “You know I can’t entertain you with my goddamn wit when I’ve got your cock in my mouth.”

This Richard, glimpsed rarely, is a pearl that Jared found early on inside the oyster shell of his boyfriend—an oyster is itself a delicacy, of course, but an acquired taste. Pearls, though strangely shaped, irregular, or unfit for lapidary, are easy to love. It’s Richard’s sheer ungovernable weirdness, a strange foxfire in an otherwise murky personality, something that even leads the cautious Donald Dunn off his normal path. “I didn’t tell you to put anything in your mouth, you’re the one who’s jumping to conclusions—”

“Yeah, you’re gonna tell me to in a minute, liar.”

“This is what you use your God-given gift for.” Jared’s laughing, his hands winding through Richard’s curly hair. They have safewords so that Jared can do this, playfully pretending to turn Richard down, something they both know he’d never otherwise do. “To predict your husband’s erections. Richard, I think this is beneath you.”

“Jared, I don’t have to predict anything, I know that goddamn dick. You’ve got like, three minutes tops and you’ll be gone.”

“Uh-huh. You’re very sure of yourself.”

Richard is barely keeping a lid on it, probably only succeeding because he’s horny, but he elaborately starts to pull down Jared’s boxers, very slowly. Acting like this is a bad seduction when it’s a foregone conclusion. “The last girl I ever tried to date, you know, it didn’t work out but she was the queen of dirty talk, all right? She lived in Warsaw, long distance. She didn’t _have_ to be good at dirty talk at all, because when I heard her voice in my ear speaking Polish I’d come in my pants anyway, something about it just drove me insane. The sound. Like that little…rub in your voice. Almost a creak, almost throaty, like you’re trying to be so quiet but—mmmm. Yup.” He’s got Jared’s waistband down, fingertips brushing over the silky skin. “Right there.”

“Richard…”

“That sound. That one. When you lean over and murmur in my ear, in a business meeting, you just…you’ve got no idea what forces you’re meddling with.” Richard’s thumb passes over the ridge of Jared’s cock, and then in the half-dark Jared feels the hot shock of his tongue over the head. But just for a second. “Anyway. We did dirty talk on the phone once, me and the Polish girl, Kasia. She did it, I mean. I couldn’t talk, I didn’t know what I felt. I knew I loved to hear a voice that was all for me. Someone who’d never met me in person, even, but she liked me enough to wanna make me come. But I couldn’t even keep a clear picture in my head of what she looked like, or imagine…I couldn’t admit that it wasn’t what I wanted.”

“How old were you?” Jared asks, although he can guess from his extant knowledge of Richard’s romantic history. He’s just embroidering the fantasy. “Twenty?”

“Twenty-one. She was telling me about other guys she’d fucked, because…because that’s what I asked about,” Richard murmurs, laughing at himself again. He’s working Jared over unceasingly through all this, Richard and his long clever fingers. “Talking about unbuttoning a guy’s jeans with her teeth, rolling the condom on with her mouth, and I was like…could I do that if I practiced? Like a straight guy thinks, you know. So I practiced.”

“Was it a cucumber?” Jared teases him.

“A zucchini. You’re good.” Richard pulls his boxers a tiny bit lower to kiss his thigh. “This is how well I know that dick, Jared Dunn. I know I can tell you this story and you’re still gonna want to come in my mouth.”

“I don’t know if that’s confirmed yet.”

“You’re gonna ask me. You’ll say please.”

Jared shakes his head, smiling. “Be that as it may. Stop dragging it out.”

“Dragging what out?”

“The story, don’t be impertinent. And I’ll tell you when you can put your mouth on me but not a second before, all right? Behave yourself. What about the zucchini?”

Richard’s mouth is technically not touching him, as any judge would agree, but Jared can feel the humid warmth of his breath. “So I was trying to teach myself the rolling-it-on-with-your-mouth trick. In the spirit of scientific inquiry. Like, is this a thing? Can it happen? Is it just a sexy urban legend? Gotta bust the myths. One second into the experiment,” says Richard, his lips almost brushing Jared’s skin, “startled by hearing Mom on the stairs, I inhaled the condom.”

“Oh, Richard.”

“Yup.”

“Were you okay?”

“Radiology said it went down the esophagus, not the trachea. I was fine. It was the gayest thing that had ever happened to me, I had to reconsider my whole life.”

“So that swallowed condom put you directly on a path to my door, you’re saying.”

“I mean I don’t believe in fate, but.”

Jared’s still trying to win this little game, although he never does. “Well, I hope our sex life doesn’t resemble a beautiful but lonely young man accidentally inhaling a condom alone. I don’t know why you think that’d get to me.”

“You love it.”

“I do _not_ , sir. I bid you good day.”

Richard doesn’t like to be refused, but he _does_ , that’s the thing. He’s instantly up from his subservient position to grab Jared by his coat lapels and pull him down, hands on his shoulders, pushing. Richard took time to learn that he has this freedom, and used to prefer the most explicit instructions from Jared, careful as a minuet.

“You said I couldn’t put my mouth on you, you didn’t say anything about _your_ mouth,” says Richard, although Jared’s already eagerly unzipping his pants without permission. “Respect your captain. C’mon, Dunn, look alive. Rum, sodomy, and the lash—oh _fuck_ —”

Richard’s diamond hard, of course. Pale in that ventral triangle where his shirt-tails part above his waistband, where his hair is coppery and soft. Jared pulls his briefs down and takes the length of his cock in his mouth. Just for a second, because he wants this to last as long as it can, but he’s hungry. He reaches down to touch his own cock, but immediately feels Richard tap his shoulder. Two fingers, a deliberate and almost papal gesture, something they’d agreed on years ago: _no hitting, no hitting, not ever, but I love it when you notice I’m not doing what you tell me, so just touch me and tell me what you saw me do._

“I’m gonna make you ask, Jared,” murmurs Richard. “Me. I am. That means you gotta let me…Christ, Jared, just—if I’m not touching that dick then you don’t get to.”

Jared moans a little. “Babe, c’mon…”

“Yeah?”

“Just touch me, just touch me, please,” whispers Jared, a flood of surrender. 

Richard brings him back up with a touch, a virtuoso knocking his bow against the strings. This is what Jared loves: when Richard has the time and the space to get to know a subject, he learns every cubic millimeter. Once, he was a confused college dropout swallowing condoms due to an overactive startle reflex, and now he’s learned how to make Jared weak in the knees.

And he learned it from Jared.

“My boy,” Jared whispers aimlessly, pressed back against the side of the truck with his hands in Richard’s hair. Richard’s mobile mouth and bitten lips. He can barely think. “My boy.” 

Outside the open doors of the truck, the aurora seems to make a sound, which isn’t the wind. Like radio static, maybe, or something rustling in dry leaves, a whisper raising the hairs on the back of your neck. Neither close nor distant, crackling in the cold air. The frogs are singing in the marshes. For a minute it’s all Jared can hear, that and his own breath, but then he can’t take it anymore and he comes hard, filling Richard’s mouth.

Richard hasn’t been taking his own advice, his hand down his pants, and Jared gently takes his wrist to pull it away. Loose-limbed and sweaty, Jared works Richard over with sensible tenderness, which is secretly the way Richard loves to be touched. Fearlessly, without surprise or hesitation, and with patient expertise, as if Jared’s an electrician working on some dangerous piece of wiring. 

_—Am I ever…_

_—What?_

_—Like, too much. For you. Too much for you._

_—No. You’re exactly enough._

Whatever happens, Jared won’t be the one who runs away. Not from this. _Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds._ Jared put that line in his wedding vows. 

(Richard seemingly took no notice, but two years later quoted it back to him, unprompted, on an anniversary card.)

When he comes, and he’s lying with his head in Jared’s lap, Richard disappears mentally for a minute or two, watching the lights but not seeing them. His breathing is steady but without that factory-piston hiss that comes with the seizures. Still, Jared can almost feel it when he comes back. “I’ve read about that, the crackle.”

“Is it the lights or something down here?”

“Something up there. There’s…” Richard makes one of his gestures at the invisible, his hands describing the shape of something no one else can see. “A layer of trapped heat in the atmosphere. Like a lid. Negative charge below, positive charge above. The geomagnetic storm of the aurora breaks through the lid and releases the charge. Crackle. Like static.”

“Mm.” Jared's trying to remember all this so that he can tell the kids when they see it. Richard would love to ramble on about space weather and physics to his audience of half-interested grade schoolers, but he's not always around or aware. “Richard?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we gonna be okay?”

It’s a question that Richard answers for a living, more or less, and Jared knows he has every right (and perhaps every reason) to refuse to answer. For a moment it seems like he will, and then he nods, turning his head in towards Jared’s hand, seeking his touch. “Yes. I’ll tell you more in the morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title refers to the classic Irish novel by Flann O'Brien; "Swim-Two-Birds" is the name of a monastery where Mad Sweeney recites one of his laments.


	3. you owe the utmost reverence to a child

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a line from Juvenal, _maxima debetur puero reverentia_ (14.47). [Ansibles](https://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/07/our-ansible-is-missing-intellectual-property-theft-in-science-fiction/) are a concept from Ursula K. Le Guin.

It’s raining, which Jared points out is actually a good thing. They’re riding on the bike path parallel to the highway, which is navigable but scattered with ejecta and debris. Both the bike path and the road are built on a narrow causeway that stretches out over the marsh, connecting Pied Piper’s campus with St. Columban’s Abbey and eventually with Bonaventure. The wind rattles the papery reeds and the rain sluices down. 

Everyone’s encased in heavy reinforced NBC suits, charcoal-impregnated felt with nylon shells that whistle in the cold. The respirator attached to the headgear is annoying to use, so they only pull it up over their mouths when the air starts to taste foul, stinging their lips. The kids are swimming in material—they got the suits from the maintenance room in the parking garage, right next to the bike locker, and they’re all sized for burly adults of various genders. Laura, who’s four, is swathed in an adult NBC smock with the sleeves pinned behind her, as if in a straitjacket. It was just easier, Richard said. She rides tucked into a child carrier seat on the back of Jared’s bike. 

The great thing about rain (or so Jared is calling out over his shoulder to the kids) is that despite the company’s promises of clarity in wet climates, the goggles immediately fog up. You can’t see anything but the next three feet of the road, and everything else is a random arrangement of grey droplets on a grey field. Pedalling in the rain is a misery of heavy, wet clothes and skidding tires, which is also a good thing because it keeps you focused on the present. So really everything’s going great.

The kids don’t believe him.

What everyone’s trying not to look at are the piles of wrecked cars that have been hurled all over the highway. There are bodies. When they pass big wrecks with multiple cars piled up on the road, they all brake to a squeaky halt, shearing the puddles, and the Bonaventure kids say Rest Eternal. The colony was originally a Catholic settlement and the kids don’t bother to consult each other about the right thing to say; the oldest, Océane, leads by example. Shruti stops with them but doesn’t cross herself, and Jared and Richard stand astride their bikes in silence.

 _rest eternal grant unto them o lord_  
_and let light perpetual shine upon them_  
_may their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed_  
_through the mercy of god rest in peace_

Richard has his mask shrugged up over his head, the most practical alternative to doffing one’s cap, and he says to Jared, “Is there like…is there a Jewish version of this?”

“I don’t know,” says Jared. “I’d look it up if I could. I don’t remember much from Mom’s funeral.”

Richard slumps forward to rest his forearms on the handlebar of his bike. “I wish it actually helped.”

“Well, it’s good for them to have a procedure that they follow,” says Jared. “Makes life a little more predictable.”

“Million-dollar slogan for Pied Piper right there,” Richard says with a snort, sliding back onto his saddle as the kids cross themselves again and climb back on their bikes.

The crater’s lip is visible at the next rise in the road, where Bonaventure’s compound used to be—like Pied Piper, they had a geodesic dome that’s shattered now, nothing but a frail birdcage of steel at the crater’s edge. Jared can smell the scorched-pork odour of burnt remains on the wind. He pulls his NBC headpiece back on and lets the respirator’s hiss block out the worst of it.

The abbey is close, and now they can all see that it’s falling down. The square bell tower is still standing, sort of, but listing to the east. The main chapel seems safe, if you’re not going near the tower, but the refectory and the dormitories are nothing but piles of rubble around their load-bearing walls. The abbey’s farm of solar panels are tossed around in the field like a pile of broken ceiling tiles, but the roof-mounted panels are intact, so the vents should still work. 

“Where’s the ansible?” Shruti asks Jared as they’re dismounting from the bikes. The rain is still lashing down, on the point of turning to wet snow. “The chapter-house is gone.”

That _is_ where an ansible would normally be, but the tech is old-fashioned by now. “They keep it in the museum at the back of the church.”

“But it still works. Right?”

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t. They don’t need satellite connections, or any other form of energy. It can only connect with its paired device in Rome, because that’s how they work, but that should still be enough.”

“Nobody ever cares what happens to us out here,” Shruti says darkly, propping her bike against the twisted fence and helping Marty, the second-youngest, out of the child-seat. “We don’t belong to anybody, we’re not Earth citizens, we’re not making cash for anyone— _you_ guys almost did, but we could barely keep the lights on sometimes.”

“We have investors but they’re…hands-off types,” says Jared, holding Laura on his hip and making sure the other kids are steady on their feet. “Raviga might…”

“Might just shrug and eat the loss,” Richard supplies. 

“I don’t think Laurie’s like that. And Monica wouldn’t let her.” If Monica even had any power over the decision. Which was unlikely.

“They’ll sit on their—on their butts,” Richard says, dragging his bike with him over the rough ground while Will toddles next to him with a tiny gloved fist wrapped in Richard’s pant-leg. “They won’t even think they’re doing anything wrong. Anyone taking a quick look at the planet would see mass devastation and the scientific models would all tell them that the buildings were poorly constructed for seismic effects and huge air blasts. They’d guess mass casualties and they’d be right. Major power plant smashed, no life support functions in the town, only a small generator still functional on the Pied Piper campus.” He sounds like he’s reading aloud from a report that the others can’t see. “Any reasonable person—and Laurie Bream is very reasonable—would look at that and assume no survivors. Or no survivors who could last long enough to be rescued.”

“But Raviga knows what you can do,” Jared ventures. The path to the abbey church is sloppy with mud. “They must know that if there was any possibility of survival—”

Richard saw something this morning that didn’t make him happy, and Jared doesn’t know what. “Guys, like…okay. Look. I sent them—don’t get excited. I sent Laurie something right before the impact. That’s what I was doing when I told everyone to follow Jared, I ran back to the office and texted her. I have no idea what she’s going to make of it, and even _if_ she decides I’m not messing with her—and you know she doesn’t take me that seriously—she’ll want to investigate first. She won’t just send a ship on my say-so. All right? Period. It could take months.” 

Jared quite likes Laurie, but he doesn’t disagree with Richard’s assessment this time. Pied Piper has been a promising but annoying investment, and she’d be sensible to take an incoherent message from Richard with a grain of salt. “But Rome has networks of ships and colonies in this system already,” says Jared hopefully. “Going to the Ignatius Mission on Nephele, or—the Oblates have the _Lacombe_ in Kepler-62. They’ll be able to move a lot faster to respond.”

“That’d be nice,” says Richard, prying the lock off the main doors.

There are bodies inside, twelve monks huddled together in the lee of the altar, with a fine veil of snow falling on their black robes from a hole in the roof. Jared and Richard drag the bodies out to the cloister walk, one by one, and neither of them can keep from whispering apologies to the dead men. _We’re sorry, we’re so sorry, but you get it, right?_

When it’s finally safe to let the kids inside to warm up, Jared takes them to the sacristy, a little room off the sanctuary. It’s almost untouched, like one of those houses in Pompeii where you can still see the lines of the knife in a loaf of bread. The closet’s overflowing with vestments in linen, silk, and satin; the air smells of clean laundry, beeswax, pontifical incense, and boxes of cheap wine. Light streams in faintly through a clerestory window covered in dust. Most of all, it’s a quiet place and the kids instinctively behave. 

“Okay, guys, settle down and take a few minutes,” says Jared. “Don’t fight over the chairs, they’re for Océane and Raffael and Marcello and Etienne. And Shruti. Because they were pedalling and the rest of you were riding in the child seats, that’s why,” he adds, heading off a protest. “They’re tired, so be nice. Richard and I are going to check out the ansible.”

At the rear of the church, past an oak partition there’s a smaller chapel. It’s not in regular use and never has been, as far as Jared can remember. Storage, really. Old stained-glass windows taken from demolished churches on Earth stand packed in insulated cardboard frames, leaning against the back wall—the colony used to have plans to put them in a new church, but it never worked out. At the front is a kitschy but rather impressive statue of St. Columban, carved out of a waxy, greenish-blue local wood.

And there, beside the broken pump organ, is the ansible. Practically sitting in a shaft of light like the Ark of the Covenant. 

A plaque next to it reads: _This device sent the first successful message from Perdigon to Earth: ‘Hearken, O my son, to the precepts of the master…’ (Rule of St. Benedict) From 2067 to 2089, it was the only reliable connection between the Perdigon Benedictines and the Abbot Primate in Rome. Nicknamed Silvabela after the Cistercian monastery to which the French troubadour Perdigon fled in 1229, this ansible is truly a part of our Benedictine heritage._

It’s in a locked box.

“What in the literal fuck,” Richard mutters, rattling the lock on the Perspex case. “Were kids sneaking in here to send the word _fart_ to Rome over and over?”

“Probably. They were definitely doing that when I was in school,” Jared says. “Any time we got to go on a field trip to the abbey, somebody would run to the ansible when the teacher wasn’t looking. One kid sent the entire lyrics of a filthy schoolyard song before they dragged him away from the machine.”

Richard likes that story, snickering to himself as he cracks open the latch with the crowbar. “Worth it, I bet.”

“He thought so. I couldn’t have done it. Teachers were the only adults who were ever nice to me, so I didn’t like to disappoint them,” says Jared, sitting down in the back pew, turned sideways so that he can watch Richard. “I would have stayed at school all day and all night, if they’d let me.”

Richard gives him a sympathetic grimace, but the metal latch goes flying when the crowbar jerks it loose and they both duck. The metal goes _ping_ and lands somewhere behind the chapel’s altar.

Newer ansibles are almost as sleek as a tablet, but this one is as thick as a heavy book, with a small keyboard and a blank white screen. Chewing on his lip, Richard runs his fingers over the sides of the machine until he finds the power button. _Chirp._ “It works, it still works, holy shit—”

“Oh my God.” Jared sags forward, letting his head rest on his folded elbow over the back of the pew. Relief that he’s barely let himself feel. “Oh my goodness. There’s a two-hundred character limit so it might take a few messages, but…”

“What do I even call this guy? We don’t know his name.”

“Right Reverend Abbot or Father Abbot, either is correct in this format.”

“Okay. Cool. Okay.” Richard picks out a message slowly on the small keyboard, a fine tremor in his hands. 

_URGENT Right Reverend Abbot, cargoliner Handsome Lake exploded in orbit over Bonaventure 5 days ago. Falling wreckage destroyed entire settlement. 14 survivors, 11 are children. Please send help._

The letters remain on the screen for a moment, then melt away.

Nothing happens.

“Um, isn’t the point of this that it’s instant FTL communication?” says Richard, who is clearly struggling not to freak out.

“Let me try…” Jared bends over the ansible, scrolling back to Richard’s message and hitting send again. For a moment he’s baffled, but then when he understands he lets out a long exhale. “Oh dear.”

“What?”

“It’s the middle of the night in Rome.”

On Perdigon, which has neither day nor night, nobody pays much attention to the clock if they’re not working. The day starts when you wake up and goes on until you’re tired. Jared’s been doing his best to keep everybody on a schedule, because kids need it and because Richard’s delicate brain gets erratic if he doesn’t sleep enough. But it’s still easy to forget that Earth is different.

“I’m gonna strangle someone. Maybe myself.” Richard hits send a few more times, spitefully, but then paces away to the other end of the chapel. “So we wait until morning. What if the Abbot Primate doesn’t even have his ansible anymore? What if he—what if he had a big ol’ garage sale in 2089 and—and somebody bought it for their dumb kid’s science project, and the thing’s in pieces now? In a dump somewhere in Italy?”

“Well,” says Jared, trying to dredge up some positivity, “if that were true I’d get an error message. It’d say ‘no paired device.’ This thing seems to _work_ , it’s transmitting normally. Nobody’s answering, that’s all. And there’s an obvious reason for that. So maybe don’t get too upset about it right now?”

“Sorry. Sorry, yeah, babe, I’m not helping.” Richard runs a hand back through his curly hair, which isn’t looking its best after the long bike ride. “But when morning comes, the Abbot’s gonna walk into the office with his coffee and he’ll see the message right away. Right?”

“If it’s in his office then yes, most likely.”

“What if it’s not? What if he’s got _his_ ansible in a museum case too?”

“He probably wouldn’t, because his wouldn’t be an object of historical interest.” Jared’s watching Richard pace up and down the aisle. “But even if it’s in a display somewhere, people would hear the message alert going off and they’d investigate. Museum patrons, security, maintenance staff.”

“You’re right,” says Richard, although his hand keeps clenching convulsively into a fist. “You’re totally right. Absolutely. We’ll be talking to someone in Rome by morning. Really talking, not…fuckin’…screeching into the void. That’s great. We’re doing great.”

“Really, I think we kind of are. We’re here, aren’t we? —Babe, come sit down,” says Jared. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine.” Richard returns to the ansible and plucks out another message, _does God extract day-labour, light deny’d? we’ll post again in the morning, sorry._ “I need to go get my head together.”

“Go where?”

“I dunno. Outside.”

Normally, Jared would let him go, but right now he’s in the mood for some screeching into the void himself. “Can it wait, babe?”

“For what, what are we doing?”

“Just…I think it’d be good if you talked to the kids about some stuff,” Jared says, more tentatively than he’d like. His therapist (gone now, like everyone else, gone gone gone gone) used to tell him to stand up to Richard. _He’s not going anywhere. He loves you. Tell him what you need._ “Like about the bodies.”

“What?” says Richard, startled out of whatever mood he was working himself into. “Me? Why?”

“Because we didn’t have time yesterday, but it’s…I know we’re not their parents but someone has to talk to them about it. About what they’re feeling.”

“For sure, but I’d make everything worse. My stupid stuttering mouth isn’t gonna help. You’re the one who’s good at stuff like that. Go ahead and talk to them, I’ll be back soon—”

“Richard.” Jared shifts position in the pew, the rack of hymnals digging into his knees. He’s exhausted. “Can you please do this as a favour to me?”

“What—wait, are you okay?”

“I mean…according to the opinions of three magistrates in Bonaventure, I don’t have any legal family here. Didn’t,” says Jared. “I didn’t have. And I can’t say I was happy here, before I came to work for you. But this…is hard for me.”

There’s a flash of guilt over Richard’s face—Jared’s learned to catch those flickers of emotion, which are usually far less guarded than the things Richard ends up saying. “I didn’t want to—I’m an idiot, I should have asked you about it. About your mom, I mean. I thought that saying it would…I’m sorry, babe.”

Jared crumples at that because he knows what the end of that sentence had to have been: _I thought that saying it would set you off._ Something like that. “No, don’t apologise, I’m so sorry—”

Richard’s awkwardly fumbling to put his arms around Jared, all the angles askew since Jared’s still sitting down. “Hey, c’mon, shh. I’m not mad at you, babe, I’m just sorry.”

“I know. I know. It’s fine.” Jared’s trying to gather his composure back. He talks about his past easily enough, because all of it happened and someone should witness it, but he rarely mentions his mother. A hole, empty like a cigarette burn in a photograph. “But I think about her a lot and I can’t right now, I can’t.”

“Okay.” Richard smooths Jared’s hair back from his forehead. “I’ll…okay. What should I tell them? Does it matter, do you just want me to distract them for awhile?”

Jared takes a long breath, rubbing the heel of his palm over his face. They’re all dirty, washing with bottled water in the sink. “You should…well, explain to the littler ones about dying, about how people don’t come back. They might not be totally clear on that part, Laura and the younger boys. Reassure them that—I mean, they might have seen movies and think all kinds of strange things happen to people when they die.”

“Like _Beetlejuice._ ”

“Exactly. Reassure them that this is not a _Beetlejuice_ situation, or a _Death Becomes Her_ situation, or even a _Weekend at Bernie’s_ situation, just a very sad human experience. And tell them it’s okay to feel whatever they’re feeling, and that we’re doing everything in our power to keep them safe.”

“All right. I can handle that,” says Richard, and it’s not completely convincing but he sounds game to try, if it’ll make Jared feel better. “Totally. Definitely. Are you gonna be okay?”

“I think I’m going to go cry in the bathroom, if that’s all right. I’d do it here but sound carries.”

Richard’s social skills are uneven, but he still understands this kind of thing in a way that Jared’s exes never have. “Of course, yeah. I’ll talk to them.”

 

Richard fails at this job with remarkable speed.

“You know, one of the first things people ever did—when we first started to be human, and not just hominids—was to bury our dead,” he tells the younger kids in the sacristy, hoping for inspiration to strike if he opens his mouth and rambles. Richard is, in fact, the only person left on this planet who hasn’t lost his parents. Who are alive and well on Earth, not that he’s close enough to them to give a fuck, and he has no siblings to wonder or worry about. He’s a guest among the mourners.

But he’s trying. “We started to bury them with their heads facing east, and we’d give them things we thought they might need,” he says. “Arrowheads and jewellery. Um, dead people don’t actually need anything. They’re not hungry or thirsty or bored or tired. That’s weird, right? But that’s the way it is. They don’t come back, not ever. Here in the abbey, it’s—you know, it’s sad to see dead people, but you shouldn’t be scared. Ghosts are only in stories, okay? Stories aren’t like real life.”

“Why aren’t they in heaven?” asks Marty, who’s five, a shy kid with a soft, tiny voice.

Richard is not prepared for this question. “What?”

“They’re all…they’re lying on the ground,” Marty elaborates, reddening when everybody looks at him. “But they’re not in heaven.”

“Oh. Okay.” Shit. “Well, that’s actually the normal thing. When you die, your body kind of…stays where you left it. Some people—um, probably people like your parents—they, uh, they like to think that your mind goes somewhere when you die. Not your body! Just your mind. Like it peels off from your brain and goes off to another world. And heaven is…one possible place where your mind could go. Other people, uh, have different ideas.” Richard is covered in flop-sweat. “Nobody knows for sure, I guess.”

“Not even you?” says Shruti, a little snidely. She’s searching her bags for food, pulling out an accordion-folded chain of instant soup packets. “You knew _this_ was coming.”

“It’s not…” Richard says and trails off. “I mean…whatever you imagine it’s like to see this stuff, um—it’s not like that.”

“Cool. That helps a lot, chief, you really sorted it all out for us.”

Jared would know what to say, but Richard can’t even stop himself from replying with the worst possible comeback: “Oh, so—so what, like this is my fault now?”

“I don’t know whose fault it is!” Shruti snaps. “Because the only person here who saw it coming won’t tell us—”

“Look, I’m not—it’s not like I have some secret answers and I’m getting a _charge_ out of not telling you,” Richard interrupts. “As soon as I was sure of what I was seeing, I freaked out and tried to save everyone I could. But by then the impact was minutes away. I had eight minutes. Okay? You think that’s not weighing on me every single second?”

“Don’t you put this on us.”

“I’m _not_ —Jesus Christ,” Richard says, holding back a stream of completely inappropriate rage, something that isn’t about Shruti at all. “If you want to think that I could have saved this entire planet, if you think I had time to call the mayor of Bonaventure or something, but I thought it’d be neat to kill them all instead—”

“I didn’t say that, you tell me when I said that—” Shruti’s looking as haggard as the rest of them, her hair half falling out of a hasty ponytail, but her eyes are burning. “I said _you won’t tell us._ How come? You think we can’t deal with it? Don’t we deserve to know?”

“I _think_ that if I tell you then you—or Jared, or somebody—you’re gonna tell me that I’m killing everyone’s hope and ruining morale and—and then I’m the bad guy and everyone’s trying to prove me wrong.”

“Oh, is that what we’re gonna do? You saw that too?”

“Wow, yeah, I’m so way off-base,” Richard says sarcastically. “You’re definitely acting like you’re gonna be cool with this. Like you’re not gonna shoot the messenger.”

“No.” Shruti has distinctive hands, a bit like Jared’s, with long thin fingers. When she points at Richard it feels a little dangerous, like she could slice right through him. “I’m not a little kid and I don’t work for you. You’re not going to tell me what I will and won’t do. You _won’t._ ”

It shuts him up. The anger’s adrenaline rush is fleeting, subsiding into dread. The first threads of panic. “Guys, I don’t…come on.”

“Tell us what you saw.”

And it’s not that the brow-beating wasn’t effective. Richard would tell her, whether to be proven right or simply to end the argument, but he reaches for words and can’t find them. The room looks like a copy of a photograph, two-dimensional, a cheap fake. It shivers like a reflection in a puddle.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice sounds fake too. Sounds like someone doing a cruelly accurate Richard Hendricks impression. “Hey, um, I’m not…I need—just a minute, just a few, not long. Until Jared gets back.”

“Sure,” says Shruti, with the depthless contempt of the young. “Go do whatever, man.”

 

There are dead men in the cloister walk and dead men in the courtyard. Shapeless in their black robes, they look like they’ve been dropped from a great height. There are pills that don’t work, so Richard doesn’t take them, sliding down to sit with his back against the wall. Jared would know the correct anatomical name for whatever room this is—the narthex, the transept, the apse, the ambulatory, the lady-chapel, the vestibule. He speaks the language around here. All Richard could tell you is that the lights are off, the floor is cold, and that he wishes it was further away from everything else in the world. Gavin Belson’s voice isn’t here now to gloat; monasteries don’t go in for AI assistants.

Richard knows what’s coming (of course he does) so he takes off his sweater and folds it into a sloppy square, putting it under his cheek as he lies down on his side. Ideal outcome: no one notices he’s gone, no one witnesses this, no more humiliation. 

He doesn’t even want Jared there, really—let the guy have a break for once. But Jared’s always there when Richard wakes up, acting like this doesn’t bother him, doing more and more favours for Richard that can never be repaid. 

 

Richard has been lying still for a few minutes, staring blankly at the ceiling—his expression, in another context, would look like boredom. Still blinking. Jared’s hand is resting on his chest, just to be sure. In, out. 

“Can you hear me?” Jared murmurs, Richard’s hand in his. “Squeeze if you can hear…”

It’s taking a long time. Jared’s kneeling beside him in the vestibule while Shruti wrangles the kids in the nave. Keeping them busy. They’re singing a French madrigal that they learned in school, something repetitive and circular. _Margot, labourez les vignes, vignes, vignes, vignolet…_

“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Richard.”

No squeeze, but a slight, uncertain but purposeful movement. Richard’s face is slicked with foamy, pink-streaked drool, so he must have bitten his tongue. Jared is kneeling in a wet spot, which can’t be helped; there’s a pool of urine on the floor. Maybe they’ll find a working laundry room somewhere in the abbey. That would be quite a luxury. 

“Are you coming back? Squeeze my hand, Captain, c’mon—there, that’s it, good.”

This time Richard does it, although with a grimace as though he resents being asked to do anything. Jared reaches down to wipe his face with a folded paper towel from the bathroom; it’s unsolicited help, which Richard doesn’t always want at this stage, but the truth is that the sight of his blood makes Jared’s stomach turn over. Even when it’s nothing.

“Can you talk yet? A few more minutes?”

Sometimes Richard comes back and he’s mostly okay—it takes him a few minutes to be able to speak, but when he does he makes sense. This time he’s not connecting, his gaze sliding away from Jared’s, and he mumbles something but it’s slurred.

“What’s that, babe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Work.”

“We’re not at work. Want to try again?”

“No.”

“Well, that was a rhetorical question, I’m sorry,” Jared says. “I have to keep bothering you, but you can sleep soon. I promise. We left Pied Piper today. Do you remember where we went?”

A lengthy pause this time, but Jared doesn’t interrupt, because he can see that Richard’s trying to work it out. “To…we went…”

“Take your time.”

“To town. But only halfway.”

That’s not wrong—St. Columban’s is about halfway between Pied Piper and Bonaventure. Still a bit worrisome. “Good. What’s between work and town?”

“Church.”

“Okay, close enough. Can you name all the kids for me?”

“Océane and her brother…Etienne. The Valeiras, Raff and Mars. Um. Julie and Iona. Anouk. The little…um, there’s Marty, there’s…Will and Peter. And Laura. And Shruti’s not a kid.”

“That’s really good. You’re doing so well. I’ll give you some words, okay? You know the drill. Peppercorn, eggshell, risotto.”

“Sounds gross. God, _I’m_ gross,” Richard mumbles, trying to sit up on one elbow and failing.

“Shh, stay put for a minute. I’ll help you find a place to lie down soon. And you’re not gross. You look handsome as ever from where I’m sitting.”

“I pissed myself, Jared.”

“That wasn’t your fault, though. You should have told me you were feeling it coming on,” Jared says, reaching out to brush his fingers over Richard’s jawline. “I could tell something was off, but I thought you were just tired and upset.”

“I was.” 

“Then we both got caught off-guard, I guess. What are the words I gave you?”

“Peppercorn. Eggshell. Risotto.” The right answer, but Richard’s looking at some empty space to the left of Jared’s shoulder. His big clear eyes are dull, like a fish in the seafood section, staring at a foreign world. “I saw Dinesh.”

“In the vision? Doing what?”

Richard’s reacting to questions very slowly, like a newscaster on a satellite delay. “Cooking,” he says finally. “Soup or something.”

A complete non sequitur, but that’s the kind of thing Richard usually says. Jared smiles. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him cook, that’s funny. I don’t know if he’s any good at it. Was that all?”

“No. But the rest I can’t talk about,” Richard says. “I need to go back.”

“Back where?”

“Under. Inside.”

Jared takes a second or two to figure out what that means. “Absolutely not. Richard, no, look at me, this is not a good time to risk your brain like that. We can deal with the visions as they come but do not overclock that tech—”

“We won’t survive if I don’t.”

“We haven’t even heard back from Rome yet. Or Laurie.”

“The ansible’s notifs are going off in an empty room in the dark. Nobody’s there. Laurie’s not the one who comes for us. Jared.” Richard tries to sit up again, and this time he manages it. “There’s a future where we make it through alive. Tell the kids, tell them I said that, but I have to see more. I have to go look for it.”

And Jared too knows what’s going to happen—that he can demand and plead if he wants to, but that Richard is going to do this anyway. That’s the way he is, it never changes, and it’s even something Jared loves when it’s not pointed in his direction. “We’ll talk about it later,” he whispers, mouth dry. “Give me your arm, c’mon. Let’s go find a place to sleep.”


	4. the light that will cease to fail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter: "Siri, why does God allow suffering?" Also, animal-lovers should take note that a great deal of violence to frogs takes place in this one.

They pile into the sacristy that night and sleep on glorious piles of clean laundry, which Shruti finds in a cart in a back hallway. Soft flannel sheets and thin institutional blankets. The laundry room itself is in service, once they throw the switch to use emergency solar power—everyone goes to sleep in albs from the vestment closet while the washer churns their normal clothes clean. Like a cast of Christmas pageant angels, minus the tinsel haloes.

Hours later (what would be morning on Earth), Richard awakes from his usual dense thicket of dreams to hear a chiming sound from the rear of the abbey church. He’s often not sure if he’s awake or asleep, and the neurologist used to tell him to stay in the habit of “testing reality”: checking clock displays, flipping light-switches on and off, reading book titles. Watching for information that changes when you look away from it, objects that don’t behave logically.

But he still hears the chiming, a simple little music-box melody, and gets up to follow it. The wind whistles through the hole in the roof, spatters of grey rain blowing in; the carpets and altar-cloths smell mildewed, a familiar Perdigon smell. Something sounds like it’s churning, far off, but when Richard pauses to listen he realises that the vast crater in the land has changed the voice of the wind.

When Richard wakes up enough to realise that the chiming is the ansible, he hurries to the back of the church, stumbling over the hem of the alb. Text is scrolling across the ansible screen.

`…at the Regina Coeli on Sunday, Pope Patrick called for an end to corporate practices of indentured servitude on colonial planets, citing the concerns of Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891…`

The Vatican News service. Richard scrolls up and down, but can only find more of the same. “No, no,” he mumbles, hitting enter a few times, typing in anything that he thinks might get attention: HELP and SOS and MAYDAY and DISASTER. But the news blurbs keep coming. “No, are you kidding me, are you fucking kidding me? What the _fuck_ —”

“Richard?” Jared’s in the doorway. He always looks rough when he’s running on a few hours’ sleep, his deep-set eyes shadowy. “What’s wrong, did they not answer—”

“They’re—transmitting the goddamn headlines, Jared, I can’t get through to a human being here,” Richard can hear a bit of hysteric tremolo in his own voice. “God—I miss Gilfoyle, he’d probably figure out how to hack this thing…”

“He _is_ gifted with hardware,” Jared says, bending over the machine beside Richard, peering at the screen. “Even if this isn’t the kind of networking problem he’s used to. —Oh, I see,” he says to himself after a moment. “The brothers weren’t using this to communicate with the Father Abbot anymore, so that’s why it was moved from the chapter-house, which is where they would’ve had meetings. They probably used to send the minutes to Rome, just as a bureaucratic thing, until satellite comms improved in the ’80s. So they stowed the ansible in here, with the plaque, and—presumably—they asked the Father Abbot to transmit the news service. This way they can check the headlines before Mass.”

Richard is out of patience with Benedictines at the moment. “What the _fuck_ do they need to do that for?”

“Things to pray for. Like right there, ceasefire in Minneapolis, they’d mention that sort of thing,” says Jared, pointing at one of the headlines with a shrug. “And for communiques that they actually wanted to send to Earth, I’m sure they’d would’ve used newer technology.”

“Newer tech that just got fried by an EMP, sure.”

Jared sighs. “Well. That’s…unfortunate. But we still might get some attention if we keep transmitting,” he said, his tone making it sound like a question. “Like I said last night, the Abbot’s ansible is probably still around his offices somewhere. Maybe nobody looks at it very often, but…”

“But if we really blow up his phone, he might answer?” Richard’s typing _fart_ over and over, idly, to no response.

“It’s not as though we’re busy. One of the kids could do it, even. Etienne hasn’t been up to doing a lot of chores yet,” Jared suggests. 

Etienne, Océane’s younger brother, is eleven. They’re Haitian immigrants to Perdigon, a tight-knit family, and Etienne is so heartbroken that he’s collapsed into mutism. “It hits them all differently,” Richard says. Types _please_. “Maybe he could manage that, just typing a few words every ten minutes or so. Yeah.”

 

Later, Richard is sitting outside on the causeway, looking out at the flat landscape of marsh. He’s roused out of a staring spell by Shruti’s voice. 

“You know how to catch frogs?”

She’s wearing hipwaders and holding something that Richard would have thought was a garden implement, a sort of pitchfork with a narrower head. A net, a closed bucket, and a massive halogen flashlight.

“No,” Richard says, staring. “I, um…don’t know how to catch frogs.”

“Okay, so you’re holding the light.”

“What?”

She thrusts the heavy flashlight at him and he takes it. “Extra waders in the bucket, take them. When we find a big frog, shine the light in his face. He’ll be hypnotised and won’t see me gigging him.”

“What?” Richard says again, but he takes the waders out of the bucket and sits down to pull them on. “Why are we hunting frogs, what do we need frogs for?”

“To eat, dumbass,” says Shruti, already wading into the swamp, letting herself down from the causeway as if into a swimming pool. “There’s good meat on the legs, we eat it all the time here. Everybody’s sick of ramen, and we found the monks’ fishing gear. There’s a smaller container in there, see it? Bring it and use it to catch jellies.”

“The white things?” Soft iridescent objects in the water, headless, wriggling. Richard thinks they can’t actually be jellyfish, since they look denser, but they’re invasive. All you’d have to do to catch them is submerge a bucket. “Those are edible?”

“I mean, they’re not _good_ , but we eat them. Put ’em in a pot with some canned tomatoes and garlic, it’s almost like cod. Just if I can’t get any frogs,” says Shruti, but her jaw is set. “I can, though. C’mon.”

“Jared can’t eat these.” They’re certainly not kosher, and if Jared doesn’t want to use that excuse, Richard plans to use it for him. There is no God, but if there were, He wouldn’t want people to eat these things. “ _I_ can’t eat these, Shruti, these are…they’re alien un-fish.”

“What, like it’s alien because it’s from Perdigon? I was born here too, earthling,” Shruti says. “Am I an alien? Just help me catch the stupid frogs, Jesus.” She continues to swash forward through the marsh, a kind of motion that requires some undignified waddling. “I wanted to apologise, but that’s not…like, I was mean. I wasn’t wrong, but I was mean.”

“Okay.” Richard isn’t that interested in apologies, but by now he’s kind of curious to see a frog-gigging. The bottom of the marsh is soft, plush with waving beds of emerald-coloured weeds, muddy, sucking at their footsteps. “Thanks? I guess? I get it that people are fucked up, like a hundred percent, but…”

“But how dare we question you,” Shruti says dryly, waving him ahead of her while she bends over the rippling water with the spear. Which is what it is—not a garden tool at all—and she’s holding it like a Roman gladiator with a javelin. “Okay, there’s our little dude. Shine the light right in his face.”

“What—” Richard doesn’t even see what she’s looking at, for a second, and then he does: a frog the size of a roasting chicken, crouched on a tussock of land, among weeds that stand shoulder-high. “Oh shit, no. No. That thing is Lovecraftian, Shruti, we’re not fuckin’ eating it.”

“Fine, don’t. But the rest of us will. Just keep the light steady.” She sloshes around to stalk the frog from behind, and then thrusts the spear. Richard can’t watch, turning his face up to look at the Perdigon perma-sunset instead. Nice clouds. Pretty light. Something heavy and rubbery lands in his bucket.

“Boom. Gotcha, Kermit. C’mon, keep moving…” Shruti wades deeper into the marsh, holding the spear higher under her arm. “You guys do this on Earth too, so don’t be a baby.”

“Earth is…a really big place,” says Richard, who can still feel the frog struggling in the bucket. “They don’t do it where I come from.”

“Where’s that?”

Richard stops to shine the light on another obscenely large frog. “University-controlled territory in Tulsa,” he says. A slow-rolling civil war has divided most American cities, and Tulsa’s no exception. “My parents were professors. Are, I mean. Emeritus. The megachurch militias took the ‘burbs and we had to wall off midtown and the campuses with sandbags, put up weapons checkpoints, the whole deal. Every couple of months some dumbshit fratboys would drive out into Jesus country to go fuck with them, drunk and screaming. Or the militias would come protest around the walls, like just…protesting our existence. People got hurt.”

“Some Black-and-Tans shit.”

“Kinda, yeah.”

Shruti hauls back and spears another frog, grabbing it by the leg and plopping it into the bucket. “Jared said you’ve always been able to see things.”

“I was about Marty’s age when it started. Five going on six.” Richard is now resigned both to the frog-gigging and to telling Shruti what she wants to know; he’s waist-deep in greenish-brown water that’s flickering with hundreds of white jellies, the singing of the smaller frogs a steady sonic backdrop. No quick escapes here. “But back then I thought everyone could do it.”

“Yeah?” She points to the plentiful jellies in the water and snaps her fingers, though she’s distracted by trying to spot another frog. “Get some of those little bastards, I wasn’t kidding. When did you know what you were seeing?”

“I don’t know.” Richard dips the plastic container into the marsh water, effortlessly pulling up some squirming jellies. What could they possibly taste like? Pied Piper’s food services always played it safe with lab meat, avoiding the local wildlife. “I would talk about it, and my mother would just say, like, ‘oh, that’s quite an imagination you have.’” His parents are English, climate-change emigrants, and he habitually slides into the accent when quoting them. “But nobody took me seriously for a long time. One morning I told them a car was going to explode in the street, and um, it did.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. There were a lot of tests, psych appointments, meds, hospitalisations, whatever.”

Shruti shakes her head, a little more gently than usual. “That’s fucked up.”

That kind of well-meaning remark never does much for Richard; it’s ritualised, practically meaningless. So he usually just pretends he’s fine with what happened. He’s picked that strategy up from Jared over the years, and sometimes it helps. “They were interested in the science of how it all works, so…I can’t fault them for that. I would be too.”

“Sure, but it’s fucked up. How _does_ it work, scientifically speaking?”

“…I don’t know. Yet,” says Richard, aiming the light at the enormous frog, who’s just sitting there, gazing at the light with its strange horizontal pupils. “We were getting really close. I agreed—before I really knew what was happening I signed an agreement to release my test results. I thought it’d help Pied Piper to have it confirmed by outside sources, but that…ended up being a really bad call. Hooli was rushing to beat us to market. They have so much user data available that our predictive engines could use,” Richard says, wading deeper behind Shruti. “I’m actually kind of…maybe a little scared of it.”

“How come?”

One of the frogs in Richard’s bucket isn’t exactly dead yet, thrashing pitifully against the plastic. “Gavin Belson offered me a contract, in the beginning. Ultimate job security. A ridiculous salary. Just to work for him and predict the markets. It would break Earth’s economy, and the colonies too. All down that whole chain of events, mass poverty and devastation. Corporate feudalism. The only way to counter that is to make precog tech extremely common. If all Belson’s competitors are using the same tools, it equals out.”

“Like mutually assured destruction?”

“Yeah,” Richard says, and then changes his mind about the wording. “Sort of. If two mirrors are facing each other, you can’t actually _see_ anything, right? Infinite recursion, effectively useless. At least, it’s useless for gaming the stock market. So we were trying to find a way to stimulate the same visions in normal people. I had an idea—which I can’t talk about. Black box of copyright, no details. But our researchers say it’s possible. We just need a prototype that works but doesn’t cause weird side effects, and that’s…it’s taken a while.”

“You’re worried about Gavin breaking the economy, but not about the effects of just unleashing this on humanity?”

“I’m worried. Believe me. But we lost all our progress to gravity and the _Handsome Lake_ , so there won’t be any universal precog revolution,” says Richard. “Gavin either figures out the tech on his own and accidentally fucks humanity, or he doesn’t and everything stays like it is. Either way, Pied Piper just lost the race.”

Shruti stops and turns around in the water, pushing her mosquito veil back from her face for a moment. “All I ever wanted,” she says, “was to get a great coding job that wasn’t on Perdigon. But my parents really, really wanted me to check things out at Pied Piper. So that I could stay close to home. When I came here to shadow Jared for a day I was humouring them, that’s it. I didn’t plan to work here no matter what you offered me. And now…”

“We can still get off Perdigon. Everyone can.”

“Yeah, but now it’s never gonna be _nice,”_ Shruti said, weary but soft. “You know? I don’t get to have fun in my twenties, I just get to deal with this. Even on Earth, even with a dream job, even with an amazing apartment, it’ll be _this._ Do you get it?”

“I get it,” says Richard, and then tries the same thing she did: “I’m sorry. That’s fucked up.”

And Richard may find those words painfully inadequate, but Shruti still seems gratified to hear them, in some small way, so maybe they’re not a waste of time. “Thanks,” she says, giving him a very slight nod of approval before turning back to stalk the next frog.

 

Back in the abbey, Jared is helping Shruti clean the frogs, a disagreeable business. Océane and Raff are helping too; Etienne is silently typing distress calls into the ansible while Mars sits with him, suggesting words and phrases to send. They’re friends, and right now Etienne needs someone to watch him. The younger ones are sorting through the daily pile of scavenged goods, bored out of their skulls and chanting pop song lyrics at each other in lieu of actual entertainment. Richard often mumbles his favourites to himself while he’s working, so the kids have learned new schoolyard rhymes from him—a few really catch on, like the experimental spoken word work of John Cooper Clarke:

_The bloody view is bloody vile_  
_For bloody miles and bloody miles_  
_The bloody babies bloody cry_  
_The bloody flowers bloody die_  
_The bloody food is bloody muck_  
_The bloody drains are bloody fucked_  
_The colour scheme is bloody brown_  
_Everywhere in Chickentown_

It’s still an improvement over the endless repetition of _Margot, labourez les vignes, vignes vignes vignolet_ and the kids have every right to express themselves, so Jared’s letting them do it.

“I think we’ve got enough here that we can throw the jellies back,” says Jared, snipping through the frog’s rubbery skin with a pair of the monks’ kitchen shears. “These fine fellows here are a pretty good size. And I won’t have any, so there’s more for everyone else.”

“Richard said you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, it’s not that I think I’m above it,” Jared says, anxious not to give that impression. “I’m just very well acquainted with the quirks of my GI tract. But my foster parents used to force me to clean frogs for hours every evening or they said they’d sign a waiver to let me work in the cannery, but one way or the other I was going to sing for my supper. So I’m used to the job.”

“Jared…” Shruti took the scissors away from him, sparing him the gruesome work of pulling the skins off the bodies. “Come on, man.”

“I didn’t mean to sound like I was asking for special treatment.”

“No, but _come on, man._ What’re you gonna eat, anyway? More ramen?”

“Julie found a big bag of TVP in the kitchens, so we can bulk out the ramen with extra protein for a while yet. I’ll be fine. So will Richard—he’s not the biggest fan of Perdigon cuisine.”

Shruti skins another frog and hands it to Jared for dismemberment with the cleaver. “He was kinda getting into the frog-gigging, though. By the end.”

“Well, that’s normal. It takes him some time to loosen up, that’s all,” says Jared. “I know you two haven’t been getting along very well, but…”

“We’re okay.” Shruti pauses to stretch her hands, which are getting numb in the damp cold. “Something he said—even if Laurie Bream or someone does send help, Pied Piper’s done, right? You lost your entire physical plant, most employees, research labs, data storage, everything?”

Jared let out a whuff of breath. “Rebuilding the company would cost a fortune. Laurie’s already invested one fortune in us, and she lost that bet. Insurance will help, but there’s no profit in store for her this time, unfortunately. The tech—what we already have patented—is still worth a lot of money, though.”

“You’re backed up on Earth?”

“We couldn’t quite afford that, considering the physical space we needed, but there’s a server farm on Basser-440b.”

“Maybe it’s better not to…I mean, maybe this is for the best,” says Shruti, picking up another frog. “This is some intense tech. Maybe it just shouldn’t be on the market.”

“A lot of people have told Richard that in the past, so…” Jared shrugs. You don’t really talk Richard out of his ideas. Either his confidence crumbles and he changes his own mind, or he barrels right over all opposition. “I don’t really like saying that anything like this is for the best.”

“I only meant the business side of it.”

“I know. But…well, do you want to hear a story?”

The answer to this is always _yes_ , in the abbey, because time presses on them like a lead weight. “Okay.”

“Years ago, my therapist told me that I should work on some of my feelings about my birth family,” says Jared, as he processes his small pile of frogs. “Including religion, so I talked to a rabbi. I was telling her about my childhood, and she told me that there’s a section in the Talmud which tries to explain why people suffer.”

“Oh boy, so this won’t be heavy at all,” Shruti says dryly, but she doesn’t stop him from telling the story.

“It’s heavy, I can’t lie to you. So the various rabbis in this section all contribute their opinions about suffering—that God is teaching us a lesson, or that bad things happen because of sin. But one guy, Rabbi Yochanan, speaks up and says one word: _Banim!_ It means children. That was all he had to say. The other rabbis understood right away that none of these explanations make any sense when you try to justify why a child should ever be hurt.”

“Dostoevsky used that move too.”

“It’s pretty universal. But later on, the Talmud gives us more details about Rabbi Yochanan and his whole story. We find out that ten of his own children died. He used to wear a single tiny bone from his youngest child’s skeleton on a string around his neck.”

“ _Jesus._ I mean sorry, but—”

“Oh, I agree with you. Very socially maladaptive coping mechanism. But Rabbi Yochanan was also a man of tremendous faith. He was known as a healer, but not a great theologian. He’d go around to see his sick friends, and he’d say really unhelpful things. The sick people would have to correct all his mistaken ideas before they could be healed.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“Well, once he went to see his friend Rabbi Eleazar, who was dying. Eleazar had been crying all night on his bed, so sick that he couldn’t move, in terrible pain. Physical pain, mental pain. Rabbi Yochanan walks in and starts trying to comfort him. ‘What’s with the crying?’ he says. ‘Are you upset because you weren’t a great Talmud scholar? I mean, you tried your best!’ Rabbi Eleazar says no, that’s not why he’s crying. Yochanan tries again. ‘Are you depressed because you never got rich? Not everyone gets to be wealthy, you know.’ Again, this doesn’t address the problem. So Yochanan remembers the earlier conversation— _banim_. This time he thinks he’s got it nailed. ‘Oh, I see,’ he says. ‘Are you grieving because you lost your son? Things could be worse. I lost ten children, remember. See this bone?’ And he shows off the grisly but beloved memento of his youngest son. ‘Suffering of this kind afflicts great people,’ he says. ‘And these are the afflictions of love.’

“But that doesn’t make Eleazar stop crying either. Finally, Eleazar says, ‘I’m not crying for any of these reasons, and none of your stupid, hackneyed attempts at comfort are worth anything to me right now. I’m crying because of _kol chai shifra d’balei b’afra_ —because of all this living beauty which is sinking into the earth. It falls and it fades and it gets lost, and nobody can ever stop that from happening.’

“So Yochanan, finally, is stunned into silence. He can’t answer. He has no argument. All he says is, ‘Well, in that case, you’re right to cry. I’ll cry with you.’ And they do, they cry together for half the night, over Eleazar’s deathbed. Finally, Yochanan says to his friend, ‘ _Ten li yadchah_. Give me your hand.’ And Eleazar was healed.”

Shruti has stopped her work to listen to the story, along with the other kids. “That’s amazing,” she says finally. “How do you remember all that?”

“It was in a book she gave me, so I read it over and over,” says Jared. “I think about it a lot. You have to, in a business like this. Otherwise…otherwise, I think working on tech like this would make you very arrogant.”

Shruti nodded, reaching for the bucket again. “Has Richard heard that story?”

“Yes, he has,” says Jared, not missing the implication. “I’ve told him. And he’s not arrogant. He’s driven, and he needs people around him to act as brakes, but he knows. Okay? I promise he does.”

“Where is he, anyhow?” asks Océane as she hefts the heavy bucket where the still-living jellies are squirming around in their silty water. “Still outside?”

“Yeah. Wanna go check on him?” says Shruti. “Make sure he hasn’t drowned or choked on swamp gas, while you’re dumping out the jellies.”

Océane drags her bucket outside, but in a few minutes she’s back. “I don’t see him.”

Jared’s shoulders tighten up, and he puts the cleaver aside to go pick up his NBC gear from the corner. “I’m sure he’s not far,” he says to the kids, as reassuringly as he knows how, although he’s just finished teaching them that reassurance is a bit of a sucker’s game. “I’ll go look. If I don’t find anything in half an hour, I’ll come back and get Shruti to help. But I’m coming back.”

“Be safe,” Shruti says, such an embarrassingly maternal thing to say that she winces a bit. It’s not a huge deal; Richard wanders off periodically, sometimes because the thing in his head is frying his brain or whatever, and sometimes just because he wants space to think. If Jared were to disappear too, that’d be a much bigger problem, frankly.

But there’s no point in obsessing over that. They have work to do.

 

Jared’s overreacting, maybe. Visibility isn’t always great in the marshes, and Océane is short. Maybe the height advantage is all Jared needs to spot Richard.

He’s feeling some foreboding, though. Richard talked about overclocking the tech, but naturally he wouldn’t pull something like that outdoors and alone, right? _Yes, actually, he would, because that way I wouldn’t be there to stop him._

The lip of the crater rises up above the wreckage of the abbey, a hillside where none used to exist. Everything’s even muddier than usual. The causeway is empty, and in the frog-hunting grounds, there’s no movement but the wind in the reeds. Jared follows the remains of the road a little further past the abbey, heading uphill to the crater’s edge. 

It’s raining again, and the sky is almost like evening on Earth, clouded over to hide the red sun, big thunderheads looming on the horizon. Jared’s just about to turn back to try the eastbound side of the road, when he sees Richard’s figure at the crater’s height.

From here, the wind is as stiff as if it came from the ocean. For the same reason: it’s howling across a massive void, with nothing to slow it down. No city, no forest, no hills or mountains, nothing but emptiness. The height of it is mind-breaking. Richard compared it to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai; you could also drop a couple of Eiffel Towers down into that pit without filling it up. 

Jared doesn’t think he’s afraid of heights, in general, but he’s afraid of this—one look over that edge and he gets on his hands and knees to crawl. Not taking any chances with his centre of gravity. Richard seems to have been sane enough to feel the same way, because he’s curled up in a foetal position some twenty feet from the edge.

“I’m so close,” Richard whispers when Jared comes near. 

“Come on back down, Richard.”

“Not yet. I can almost reach him.”

“Who?”

“Dinesh.”

Jared has no clue what this means—it might be very literal, from Richard’s perspective, or it might be some symbolic vision (like the soup) that can’t be easily deciphered and makes very little material difference. Jared never argues with Richard directly; the psychologist said that it’s better to simply empathise, validate, and keep him physically safe. “Well, can you reach him from back down in the abbey?”

“Helps being up high.” Richard’s not completely neurologically wrecked this time, since he can talk, but he’s still pale and shuddering, shrinking back from Jared’s touch like a sensitive plant. “Don’t make me go back down.”

“You have to eventually. And I don’t want to stay up here.”

“I’m so close. I’m so close. Ten more minutes.”

Jared likes extravagant gestures of trust. He likes to take absurd risks for the sake of love, because he feels like that’s the only way he’s worthy of it. But he’s found his breaking point. “Richard. I don’t tell you this often, but _no._ Period. The end. Whatever you’re doing, you’re a very intelligent person and you can figure it out at sea-level. Without risking your life. Those kids down there _need us_ and this is unacceptable. Especially when you won’t even say what you’re trying to do.”

“I’ll try, I can try to tell you…” Richard rolls over on his back, letting his head loll on the ground, watching the thunderheads above. He’s pale but practically vibrating with excitement. “Dinesh and Gilfoyle, their neural network, Ahriman. When we were all still working together, Ahriman had receptors built in to interface with our tech. They wanted to make sure they’d have the capability to use it if we ever got to market. Those receptors _are_ ansibles, technically—they work using simultaneity and entanglement, just like an ansible does.”

“Right—”

“That means _this_ —” Richard slammed the heel of his palm against the scar on his temple. “Can still deliver data to Ahriman. A system that we _know_ is still in use and closely monitored. Gilfoyle would never ignore a strange signal coming through those receptors. He wouldn’t rest until he figured out what it was. And they’ve been doing amazing, their IPO was bananas—Dinesh must be as rich as Laurie by now. He’d save us. He will.” 

They’ve had their hopes crushed so many times now that Jared’s afraid to believe in this one, but it sounds plausible. “Can you stop for tonight, though?”

“Yes. No.” Richard gets up on his knees as well, crab-walking further away from the lip of the pit, back down towards the road. “Yes, yeah, I want to write some stuff down. I’m sorry, babe, I just—”

“If we leave right now I won’t stay mad at you,” Jared says, in the parental tone that often works on Richard. “You scared me, that’s all. Don’t wander off like this again.”

“I won’t. I won’t.” Lightning is jigging over the horizon, and in such a flat land, even Richard will take that risk very seriously. “Let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story Jared tells is one I first encountered in Alan Lew's book _This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared_ ; its original source is in Brachot 5a-5b in the Talmud, if you're curious. The detail about university vs. megachurch militias comes from speculations by the War Nerd, John Dolan, which I thought were interesting and not unlikely. Chapter title is from a song by [Stereolab](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F1OcUB3GKM&list=RD5F1OcUB3GKM)


	5. mightily and sweetly ordering all things

When Richard goes away inside his head, this is where he goes.

As a kid, he read about the memory palace of Sherlock Holmes, and the memory palace of Hannibal Lecter, and the memory palace of Dr. Julian Bashir in a _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_ tie-in novel. (Bashir’s was in the form of the Hagia Sophia, which was extra cool.) A kid who’s in the hospital a lot will read anything, searching keywords on his tablet, combing through the most obscure pages of the results, fingertip tapping repeatedly on the glass (as if at a zoo) while books unfold themselves in front of him. 

So Richard built a palace of his own. Okay, well, he likes to sound smart about architecture but it’s really not his thing. Not so much a Hagia Sophia, more of…a loving reproduction of one of his favourite puzzle game levels of all time. The floating tower in _Arallon II_. The last great game Peter Gregory ever designed. The graphic style looks dated now, but Richard still remembers that it once inspired awe. Or there’s the sense of melancholy satisfaction that he had when he first explored the place in the game—the mystery had been all but resolved by then, and Richard was left to grapple with the emotional weight of the story. All the doors would open then, and all the drawers give up their secrets. Richard used to speedrun through the whole game, over and over again, all the clues memorised, just to get a chance to wander through the dizzying upper floors of Arallon itself. One more time.

The logic of a mental image like this is that it takes advantage of the brain’s real estate—the hippocampus and the medial parietal cortex are activated when using the technique, improving retention of information. Cueing memory to images, pathways. 

Richard isn’t particularly interested in memorising things, though; instead he uses the levels of the tower to organise his awareness of the future. The higher he goes, the more abstract and fragmented the data becomes. Each successive storey becoming gradually less coherent. 

 

There’s a room with a pool in it, a Roman-style atrium, full of blue lotuses, shaded from an Earthly yellow sun by pillars and latticework. When the pool runs dry in the baking summer heat, Richard opens a stiff faucet that’s almost hidden under curtains of star jasmine. He doesn’t know what the jasmines smell like in real life, and has only seen the pixelated sprites waving in the artificial breeze of the game. He imagines climbing white roses instead, the kind his mother used to try to grow in Tulsa. Cut grass, a whiff of summery chlorine and Coppertone. All the smells from Earth that he won’t let himself miss.

The faucet creaks and fills the pool. The lotuses drift and twist on their long underwater stems, the networks of lilypads riding the wavelets when the water moves. If the pool is full, and if the ripples make glancing bright shadows on the columns, then it means he knows things. But the water levels rise and fall unpredictably.

If no water comes, those are the days when Richard has to shrug and mumble about how he doesn’t see everything. Sometimes he needs to leave the tap open and wait, and wait. The rush of water, when it comes, might be strong enough to knock him out.

This time, the faucet’s been on all night. The pool has flooded, inches of green water rilling over the stone floor and plashing down the steps, leaking into anteroom and hallway. It’s cold and Richard’s feet are bare, but he doesn’t have enough spare attention to imagine himself some shoes. He’s looking for something.

Over time, he’s found that this is just the way it is. He can change the way the information comes to him, ask for more of it, ask for _more longer sharper louder clearer_ , but then the shape of his inner world is altered. The brain changes all the time, but it never changes back to what it used to be.

He follows the sounds of voices.

 

Laurie and Monica are in another chamber, or their images are. Laurie doesn’t notice the six inches of water because it doesn’t exist where she is. 

“Mr. Hendricks is…excitable,” she’s saying, cutting a small wake as she paces. “It is to be expected, in a man. Of his abilities.”

“You can’t ignore a distress call because you think Richard is—I mean, I’m not even saying you’re wrong,” says Monica. “Maybe he had a weird morning and sent you something that he’s embarrassed about now, I don’t know. He’s sent me weird messages too. Not like that.” She grimaces. “Not sex-weird, just weird-weird.”

“Really,” says Laurie, either curious or bored out of her mind.

“One morning I woke up to this text that said, ‘buy an Almond Joy today even if you don’t like nuts I don’t care do it.’ And I did, because…because this tech is creepy and I didn’t want to take any chances. He never mentioned the Almond Joy again, though.”

“And are you? Partial to nuts?”

“Not really. I kept it in the bottom of my purse for a week like a freak, though.”

“I see.” Laurie has paced her way to the other side of the room, quite close to Richard at the door, although she isn’t aware of him. “Monica, the fact that Mr. Hendricks holds up well to testing is the only reason I tolerate such…carnivalesque extravagances. I assure you he is not the first male CEO to carry on like an oracle. I will grant him exactly as much respect as his abilities merit.” Laurie tilted her head. “That is to say. Some. But I will not carry an Almond Joy in my purse, Monica. I detest nuts.”

“Okay, but Laurie, this isn’t an Almond Joy—”

“No. It is not. It is a demand, which is scarcely coherent, for a rescue effort which would cost Raviga ninety million dollars.” Laurie reaches out a finger to tap an invisible screen, and somewhere in an office on Earth she and Monica stare at the text message that Richard sent them.

`Laurie, I don’t know if you’ll ever see this—I’m saving this as a draft and hoping that this is the worldline where I have time to hit send when I find out for sure. So. It wasn’t an asteroid—it won’t have been one. That huge crater that you’ll see, if I’m right, the crater was the Handsome Lake. It’s not a place. Native American guy, somebody from up east, maybe Iroquois. He could see the future too. He knew what we’d fuck up. This cargo ship was named after him, but I don’t know the nationality. Jared’s the one who would know what cargo lines serve our off-world supply orders. This ship will explode in orbit. May already have. May be about to. Wreckage and ejecta, winds, waves to twenty feet in the wet biomes. 44.99576649 N, 001.99205810 E. That’s where we will be when we’re found; we’re not there now. Don’t bother to search Pied Piper’s wreckage. I mean. Not for us. Obviously search for remains. There will be children, I’m nearly completely sure. Maybe not much else, God. I’m doing my best not to be dramatic. I can’t tell how it's going.`

Monica makes that pained expression that she often makes around Richard, which is empathy that has cooled to a cringe. “Yeah, I know, but—come on, Laurie, we can both tell what he’s trying to say. It’s a little confused, but he has the coordinates mapped to eight goddamn decimal places.”

“Lengthy strings of numbers are not uncommon in his correspondence.”

“Well, how about this? The _Handsome Lake_ is real, it’s an American cargoliner that last checked in at Frontenac Station a few weeks ago. It’s made runs to Perdigon before, the company said.”

“Then the company will surely follow up if the ship does not check in at its next rendezvous point. Wherever that may be.”

“That doesn’t let us off the hook.”

“Monica.” Laurie turns back to face her. Sometimes it’s obvious that she’s fond of Monica, or at least it makes sense to Richard. Monica herself often seems baffled by Laurie’s purported affection. “Would you not say I am a mentor figure to you?”

“I…yes? Of course, definitely.” Monica pauses. “I mean, I would say that you are, unless…?”

“Yes. Beloved, you understand. And wise. Like a Merlin figure, perhaps, or Alcuin of York.”

“Um—”

“There are not many feminine examples. What I mean, Monica, is that I wish to nurture your greatness. And I advise you not to engage in hermeneutics over a man’s texts. Whether those texts be sexual or merely para-sexual in intent. You are not a _Jesuit_ , to be…interpreting his words, and speculating on this and that, and taking responsibility for imaginary duties. You are a self-respecting businesswoman.”

Richard is listening to all this from the doorway, trying not to take it personally. Really trying. Very hard. Laurie is like this; she doesn’t know him well, and she interacts with Pied Piper mainly via its numbers, which aren’t great. But Monica has their back.

“As for the…alleged disaster,” Laurie goes on, “I would not ignore it, and indeed I have not. I have notified our possessions in the region and asked for a report on the status of the Bonaventure colony. I’m awaiting a response.”

“What if we’re waiting too long, though? That planet’s a toxic swamp.”

“Mr. Dunn is a former resident, is he not?”

“Jared lived there when he was a kid, for awhile, but—”

“And when Mr. Dunn suggested moving Pied Piper’s facilities to Perdigon, he informed us that the planet is well-terraformed and that its atmospheric conditions are easily manageable with nothing more than inexpensive equipment and common sense. Did he not?”

Monica drifts out of view for a moment, as if the shadows in the room are sucking her back, but she answers, “Laurie, you know Jared was trying to make the best of it. That’s what he does, and that’s his job. I’m worried about Pied Piper, okay? I don’t like this. Can we hurry things along somehow?”

“Without confirmation that anything is amiss, I will not spend a small fortune on an expensive and very likely unnecessary rescue, Monica,” says Laurie, putting her glasses back on and sitting down. Probably in the real world she’s at her desk. Meaning the conversation is over. “However. If you discover that your suspicions are correct, then of course you must act without delay to preserve our investments. And Raviga’s reputation for…benevolence. I shall trust your good judgement.”

They fade from view then. Probably they’ve both shifted their attention to something else, an energetic nudge that’s enough to make Richard’s view of the scene fill with static. 

_Static_ is metaphorical, one of those sensations that he can never explain to other people. Rapidly losing focus, visual breakup. Fishnets of phosphenes against closed eyes, leopard-print spots, like what you see when you hold your breath.

 

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything, baby,” says Jared, who’s sitting with him while the kids blow off some steam. Playing tag in the field beside the church, since the rain has stopped for a few hours. “Are you doing okay?”

“Fine.” Richard settles back into his corner. He’s nestled under the lee of a pillar, with one real pillow and a few folded blankets to keep his ass a few inches above the stone tiles. “I thought I heard you.”

“No. I said something to you twenty minutes ago, but you didn’t answer.”

“What was it?”

“Oh, nothing. Sometimes you twitch or make noises and I think you’re coming out of it, that’s all. Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Huh? No, I’m not done,” says Richard, arranging an extra blanket between his knees to cushion the bones. He’s lost some weight since the disaster. “I saw Laurie but that doesn’t matter, she’s…busy being Alcuin of York. Whatever. I don’t care what she thinks.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, babe,” Jared says softly, leaning over to press a kiss to his temple. “Don’t you think you should take a break?”

“I just got going.”

“It’s been five and a half hours. Remember last time when you overclocked the implant, because you were fixated on proving something to Gavin Belson—it took you weeks to recover. Let’s do a quick mental status exam, okay?” says Jared, crouching down beside Richard’s nest of blankets. “Do you know where you are?”

“The abbey.”

“Good. What happened on March 19th, 2186?”

“I was 19, I was away at college, the TA came in and she’d been crying…”

“Okay, good.” Jared knows this story already, so he’s convinced. Everyone remembers where they were on March 19th. “Name me some words that start with I.”

“Ionosphere. Iodine. Indentured. Iridescent. Idiopathic.” Richard closes his eyes. Jared’s watching the time, counting to ninety seconds. “Irgun. Ignoramus. Igneous. Illegitimate. Intimate. Immaculate. Idiomatic.”

“Good. Repeat this sentence: She said that they had to go back there to get them.”

“She said that there—that they—fuck you, this is not cognitive deficit,” Richard says, frustrated. “This is…my normal stutter, you gave me a really hard one.”

“The neurologist said to use lots of pronouns. She said that they had to go back there to get them.”

“She said that they had to go back there to get them. There, see?”

“Good.”

“Can I get back to work?”

Jared is quiet for a moment, then says, “I wish you wouldn’t ask me for permission. Because I want to tell you no.”

“Jared…”

“Exactly.” Jared gives him that grin-and-bear-it smile that Richard doesn’t like having to see. “Exactly. I have absolutely no right to tell you what to do. It’s your brain and it’s your body. So don’t ask me. Do what you have to do, Richard.”

Richard flops back down on his pillow. “Okay, fine. What time is it, do I need to eat? Is that the issue?”

“Customarily one would eat a meal, yes.”

Richard doesn’t object to this, so Jared gets out some of their pathetic provisions: a plastic sleeve of crackers, not too smashed; cold wedges of fried polenta made from a bag of cornmeal that they found in the kitchen; individually wrapped cheddar cheese slices, warm; an irradiated red delicious apple. Caffeine tablets, vitamins.

“Maybe the frogs are okay. I might try those next time,” says Richard as he stuffs his face. “Who found caffeine?”

“Shruti found a first aid station, they had some basics. People who are fasting often hit a caffeine withdrawal in the first eighteen hours, so that’s probably why they had that in stock. And I might try the frogs too, eventually,” Jared says. “I’ve gone without protein for long periods before, and it’s very uncomfortable. Your hair falls out.”

“Then eat the frogs, babe.” Richard isn’t feeling very choosy anymore. He’s eating mechanically, quickly, as if his body’s very hungry, but he doesn’t really feel it. “Just…the jellies still creep me out. I keep thinking they’ll turn out to be sentient.”

“Xenobiologists say it’s unlikely. The jellies don’t perform well in tests of intelligence.”

“Those things are bogus anyway,” Richard mutters, a personal animus.

At the other end of the church nave, the kids have found a length of cord whose weight swings nicely, so they’re jumping rope. They’re singing the traditional songs of Earth that Richard remembers from his own playground years: _had a little sportscar 1968_ , _Texaco Texaco over the hills to Mexico_ , _Cinderella dressed in yella_ , _calling all cars calling all stations_ , _she is handsome she is pretty_. 

But they’ve also built up a repertoire of their own. Bonaventure’s vocabulary is full of French loanwords that even Richard has picked up by now, such as _bibitte_ for a small, undefined insect, or _bonhomme_ for a stick figure in a drawing. The madrigal about Margot the vineyard-labourer has not gone away. And the Latin hymn _Tantum Ergo_ has a meter that’s the same as _oh my darling Clementine_ , something that the kids learned from one of Jared’s historical factoids—the hymn’s melody used to be a satirical marching song in the army of Julius Caesar.

Thus, to the tune of Clementine: 

_Ecce Caesar, nunc triumphat, qui subegit Gallias,_  
_Nicomedes non triumphat, qui subegit Caesarem…_

Richard is constantly surprised by the things the kids do and don’t know, thanks to Bonaventure’s school system. He doesn’t think much of it, because it sounds like the curriculum was entirely based on reactionary prestige nonsense like memorising Cicero speeches at twelve. Lots of rote learning and very little real critical thinking. An education intended to impress the parents rather than to benefit the children.

And Jared has been pestering him for months to take an interest in Pied Piper’s upcoming educational program, and Richard hasn’t, because he’s been really busy, but now he wishes he had. 

“I like that they put that together themselves,” Richard says finally, as he gathers up his wrappers into a pile. “Their _Ecce Caesar_ song, it’s referencing something that they actually learned from you and absorbed. They made it their own. Better than parroting, like with fucking Margot and her vineyard.”

“Everyone’s a bit tired of Margot,” Jared agrees. 

“ _Fucking Margot._ She went to Lorraine and got into an orgy, did you know that? That’s what the words mean.”

“I didn’t know you spoke French,” says Jared, clearly a little turned on. The effect is so Gomez Addams that it makes them both laugh.

“Yeah, no, I do _not_ speak French, but I know every single word of that stupid song. I asked Océane about the translation because I can’t stand being earwormed when I don’t even know what the words are.”

“Oh, I see. I’ve just been dissociating when it starts to bother me.”

“And this—Jared.”

Jared waves off his concern. “No, go on.”

“Okay, well, it’s a filthy goddamn song, all right? Margot’s been hired to plough the vineyard in the fall. _En revenant du Lorraine, Margot rencontrai trois capitaines_ , I mean, it’s right there. She went to Lorraine, came back, met three army captains on the road. It’s seamy. I think the third verse is about venereal disease, too. But it’s vague.”

Richard goes on in this vein for some time, talking about a cryptic line in the song that may be about the Hippocratic quartan fever, whose periodicity derives from the life cycle of the malarial protozoa. From long experience, Jared can tell that this rambling is a red herring.

“This place is really getting to you, isn’t it?” he says.

“It’s not that I disapprove of…of, you know, frank sexuality,” says Richard, who is only now realising that he’s been channelling something else into this petty complaint about Margot. Having kids around all the time has put a certain furtive pressure on his sex life with Jared. “I’m not a prude here.”

“No, you’re not.”

“But I think it’s _something_ , okay, that _this_ school probably thought they were being so—so classical, and refined, and _holy_ by teaching madrigals in the twenty-second goddamn century, and oops, turns out your cute little vineyard song is about a girl getting—” he lowers his voice not a second too soon. “Getting railed by—by three…three hot military dudes at once and—Jared, I think we should step out into the…place…for a minute…”

 

They end up in the shower.

Richard is a big aficionado of bathrooms. An aesthete, a connoisseur, if you will. He loves those cool tiles on bare skin, a sensation he associates with coming down from a bad panic attack. When his stomach is empty and his brain is empty and the drugs have hit and he feels like he just cast a demon out of his own body. Richard loves a door that locks, inside another door that locks. Loves a cloud of steam that obscures the mirror. Loves the way his voice doesn’t sound like his, between the spray and the small acoustic space of the shower. Tons of great things about bathrooms.

And they’re even better with Jared. It’s not a kink, but isn’t it, though? Richard’s never completely sure what is and isn’t kinky. His only real context is Jared and himself, which has got to be a skewed sample. 

At home, their real home, their suite at the Pied Piper compound, Richard used to pee in the morning with the bedroom door open, and it was…sort of for Jared? Somehow? Not the peeing, but the open door. As if to say: _I have every right to close this, and I have every reason to, but I’m not going to. Because this way I can still see a piece of you in the mirror. Your hand and the corner of the blanket. I can see you even when I’m turned away. Even in the dark._

Jared probably doesn’t know that, and thinks Richard’s just being rude.

“I never feel clean anymore,” Richard says, stepping under the water with Jared behind him. “At least we _have_ hot water, fuck knows I’m not complaining. But everything outside is so dirty.”

“The dust is all ejecta from the impact, it comes in on the wind,” Jared says absently. “Let me wash your hair?”

Richard took a long time to get his head around this in the beginning, and maybe he still doesn’t get it, but there are chores that Jared does because someone has to, and then there are chores that he _loves_. Richard would have thought this was one of Jared’s excuses—the way he’ll pretend to prefer sitting in the middle seat on a plane. But no, there’s a note to Jared’s voice when he asks…and he always asks first, when it’s something like this. 

That’s Richard’s cue, so he lets go. 

Jared touches him as if he’s beautiful. Richard doesn’t believe that, but he does believe that he might become beautiful if Jared keeps touching him. The enchantment may be slow but any day now it’ll start working. That’s how Jared’s hands feel, long fingers combing through Richard’s hair, smoothing it back from his forehead and temples.

“One time my foster parents gave me a doll for Christmas,” said Jared, “as a shaming tactic, not as a reward, but I think it backfired on them. They wanted me to hate it, but Cordelia was the best toy I’d ever had.”

“Cordelia? Really?”

“Like in _Anne of Green Gables_.” Jared’s working the shampoo through Richard’s hair, sensible and firm, like a barber. “I could only play with her when I was sure I was alone, or I’d have never heard the end of it, but it was special. I would wash her and dress her, ask her about her day.”

“Oh my God, I’m Cordelia now.”

“No, no…” Jared reassures him, but they’re both smothering laughter. They can’t be loud or the sound will carry. “I mean, it reminds me. But no, you’re not my doll. You don’t always let me do this.”

“I do when you ask like _that_.”

“I didn’t say anything different,” says Jared, but he knows, reaching down to lather up Richard’s cock, gently pulling back the foreskin to rinse beneath it. 

“Fuck, I really want you in me right now…”

“Once I get you all nice and clean.”

“Excuse me, I am ready any hour of the day or night,” says Richard, a ragged version of his usual butt-centric bravado. Richard has somehow found a way to be proud of one single solitary part of his body, and it’s his butt, and whatever, okay? It is. His butt is just fine. 

Ordinarily, Richard keeps his /dev/null spotless. Everything else is a lost cause. Shaving on time will not make him handsome; showering is useful for code ideas but can only keep him hovering around a 5/10, realistically. Very little return on his efforts. But his butt is like an operating theatre and it’s ready for emergencies anytime, anywhere, anyway. 

Richard does have the unfair advantage that he’s never taken by surprise. On a boring night he’ll preview future encounters for prurient interest. He knows how this is going to go. He’s already a fan. No wonder Jared commented once that he’s a ‘quick study.’

But Jared’s soaping him up anyway. “We’re in a disaster zone, Richard, no one expects you to be completely squared away back there.”

“‘Squared away.’ You make it sound so military, I like it. Shipshape and Castro fashion.”

“This is a thing for you, is it?” says Jared, like a sex therapist. “You’ve brought up these naval fantasies before.”

“It’s _your_ thing.”

“Are you sure?” says Jared as he parts Richard’s cheeks for the shower spray, working the lather over the small of his back, the divots on either side of his spine, the cheeks, the hole. Jared likes to call it the fundament, a word for which Richard had to check the OED. He likes it too. “The motif does recur. I have no idea what would set such fancies off in a Tulsa boy.”

“Horatio Hornblower novels.” Richard has no idea if those are literature or tacky or what; he can never tell. But he was in the hospital for a series of cerebral scans one week, needed reading material, and wanted to pretend the noises from the machines were the creaks of a cargo hold shifting in a storm. “And then…yeah, fuck, you’re right, _Billy Budd_. I was fourteen.”

“I see. And then Aubrey and Maturin, of course.”

“Yeah, and see, that’s where _you_ get this naval fantasy of _yours_ , you tried to project that onto me just because I made a Pogues reference last time we fucked. Now it’s this whole thing. I am onto you, Jared Dunn, you and your…your headgames— _fuck_ , yes, God, your fingers…”

Richard arches his back under the warm water, spreading himself open for Jared’s fingers. Dispassionately as a nurse, Jared is cleaning him out: plain water, only a little soap around the exterior, no baroque nonsense. Jared has had to explain to him the evils of douching, casual enemas (and emotional, heartfelt enemas as well, for that matter), bleaching, and every other excess.

Ordinarily, Richard would take that as a challenge, because he likes to take things too far, but somehow it’s hot listening to Jared talk about all that health-class stuff. It’s so positive. It’s so sweet. It’s so Jared. And he’s talking about enemas. Is that a kink?

“Okay, okay, enough fingers, I’m ready,” Richard’s murmuring, now that his hands have found steady purchase on the tiled wall of the shower. Not too wet, no soap, firm grip. “I want you, what do I need to do to get your dick inside me here—”

“Now, Hendricks, if we are to do this we must be gentlemen about this—”

“Don’t I outrank you in this fantasy anyway?”

Richard can’t see Jared’s expression but he can almost hear that smile. “Sir.”

“Oh, it’s like that.” Richard slips into the accent of his parents and their family, one that he had and lost himself as a child. It’s not a particularly glamorous accent; his father’s from Leeds and his mother’s from Nottingham. Nevertheless, it has an electric effect on Jared and Richard tries not to overuse it. “Now then, Dunn, I can see that discipline has been slipping, and we shan’t have that in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. If your cock isn’t ready to hand then you _make_ it ready. You needn’t think I’ll do it for you. _I’ve_ been ready since the sodding Napoleonic War, now get to it.”

“Yes sir, right away, sir.” It’s working all right, Jared’s hard cock rubbing up against him. He turns the water off, a distraction. “Permission to come aboard, captain?”

Jared’s corniness: somehow also really hot. “Granted.”

They have petroleum jelly, which not ideal as lube but it’s easily available at a monastery’s first-aid station. It’s okay, for what they’re up to, which is a shower quickie with a naval fantasy that neither of them is terribly committed to. It’s filling a need. Richard still needs to sleep and he still needs to eat and fuck. And he needs Jared to keep touching him, so that one day the enchantment will finally be finished—it’s an extraordinarily long ritual that takes many years—and make him beautiful. Like these smooth pale hands around Richard’s hips, like the black hair slicked back with water, like those Waterford crystal eyes, fucking beautiful like _that_.

There’s no moaning allowed. Not here. Richard copes with this using a technique that he thought he invented as a kid, a sort of harsh but controlled breath, like Darth Vader. Jared says it’s ujjayi breath, a yoga thing. Jared likes yoga. _Breath of victory, encourages pranic flow._ Richard is swearing too much for a yoga class right now, a stream of it in a whisper while he closes his eyes, full, ecstatic. 

“That’s it, that’s okay, I’m okay,” he tells Jared, forgetting the sea-captain thing for now. Forgetting everything except Jared’s whole length filling him and stretching him out. “Just a—over—good Christ, yup, like that, fuck me like that…”

It’s over quickly; they were both sorely in need. Richard comes and then Jared does, and they wash up afterward in comparative silence. Jared is often meditative after sex. He used to cry, although he could never put into words why, except to say that it was nothing Richard had or hadn’t done. _It’s only the past._ Richard believes him.

“Are you coming to bed?” says Jared as he turns the water off again. 

“I have to work a little more.”

“I thought we were done for the day.”

Richard bites his lip. “I think I’m still really close.”

“How long do you think you’ll be?”

“I don’t know. I never know how long it takes, you know that.”

“Richard…” Jared begins, and then he gives up. Sighs. Opens the shower door. “Okay. We talked about this, so okay. Do whatever you need to do, babe.”

Richard isn’t sure if that’s sincere or if it’s the prelude to a fight, but he’s going to take it as sincerity. Because he needs to get back to work.

 

He doesn’t even assemble his memory palace this time, just sleepwalks back to his blanket nest. The water is running and the sinks are overflowing and season of the inundation is upon them. _Acqua alta._ The abbey blurs into visions. The kids are worn out, clapping songs in place of jump-rope, _down down baby down by the rollercoaster_ , and Jared is sitting stoically with Mars and Iona, reading _Blubber_ by Judy Blume aloud. In the back of the church, silent Etienne has been tapping messages into the ansible all day, or all night, or whatever time it is. Nobody knows what he’s saying, but it’s probably good for him. He sleeps sounder, a little.

Richard settles down behind his pillar in the sanctuary, cross-legged with some padding under his good ass. 

Somewhere—somewhere very far away, across the vast reaches, jai guru deva om and all that—there is another ansible on Earth. It sits in a closet in an office of Sant’Anselmo Church, Saint Anselm on the Aventine.

There’s a lost arch on the street outside, remnant of a long-gone building, straddling a garden wall. A young man with a shaved head and a radiant smile is bringing flowers for the secretary, and Richard hitches a little ride on his worldline for awhile, watching this guy’s near future: soon he’ll round the corner on his bike and pass the ever-present summer construction scenes along the Tiber. Which is the shade of green that one only sees in slow rivers and the human iris, a hazel-green river. A section of grimy old medieval wall turns into concrete, covered with vines. Palms and plane trees on the Aventine Hill itself where its slope crests over the walls, and on the Via di Santa Sabina there are pollarded trees that look like the background of a Giorgione painting, as perfect as bonsai. Pink blossoming bougainvillea behind a gate. 

The young man is from Oregon, still discerning, staying in monasteries, visiting the old favourites: Siena, Padua, Assisi. What little is left—coastal cities like Venice have been underwater for a generation. Some floods are real. This one is imaginary. Swelling out of fountains and riverbanks, pouring invisibly through the streets. 

The pretty admin assistant at the Benedictine headquarters is pleased but worried by the flowers; she has a boyfriend. The young man isn’t dismayed at all; his intentions, maybe for once in human history, were pure. He saw pink carnations and wanted this girl to hold them for awhile. As if a Roman girl even needs flowers, living in a city like this. 

He walks right past the closet that holds the ansible.

Richard can do nothing. He can watch it happen, and is privy to a certain flow of cause and effect, thought into action, feeling things happen, helpless to change them. The ansible is chiming. The Vatican news service.

The boy from Oregon hears it, the sensory data reverberating all the way down the wire to Richard. _Answer it. Answer it._

Oregon walks back, pauses by the closet door. He’s not even an intern, just helping out around the office for a couple of weeks until he moves on to Cascia, because he owes St. Rita a favour. The office is quiet, nearly empty. “Guys? Hi? Ciao?”

An Irish brother in a habit backs out of an office door with an armload of paperwork. “Lost?”

“Nah, but there’s a noise in the closet. Like, is that supposed to be there? Did somebody forget their phone? Ringtone like a music box?”

“Oh, that. An old ansible for the colonies. We have it set to run the headlines.”

“It’s really going nuts, though.”

The brother opens the close door. Peers inside. “I don’t think its screen is usually lit up,” he says, sweeping some jackets and sweaters aside with a sistrum-rattle of metal hangers. The ansible’s screen fills the closet with blue light. “If Roy up in St. Columban’s wanted to send anything to headquarters I’m certain he would’ve used the usual…hmm.”

“It’s saying SOS. Should we do something?”

“Kids prank these things sometimes.” The brother sweeps back over to his desk, rosary clacking at his side, and sits down at the computer. “When did we last talk to Roy, I can’t even…two weeks ago, right. Lumen, connect to St. Columban’s office on Perdigon, please.”

_“Connection failed.”_

“Why’s that?”

_“No satellite.”_

The hope is excruciating. Colonial satellites die all the time. They’re garbage to begin with, usually. But the brother wrinkles his brow and goes back to the closet, leaning in to type, _“This is Brian at Sant’Anselmo—all right over there?”_

 

Great.

So.

That happens, but Richard isn’t sure when. It feels close; he’s not sure. Maybe in a few days. Maybe next week. Next month. Looks like summer in Rome. People ignore persistent notifs in the background, turn up the music in their headphones, get on with their lives. Richard won’t pin it all on the nice kid from Oregon.

There’s one other place he wants to go.

 

Spooky action at a distance, as they say. Entanglement. The implant in his brain can theoretically transmit to Gilfoyle’s Ahriman network, a machine mind that practically is Gilfoyle these days. Ahriman is set to receive inputs from a mass precognitive network that hasn’t materialised, and right now that network is a single transmitter in Richard’s implant, pinging on the hour. 

 

In Palo Alto:

“What the fuck was that?”

Dinesh has just stumbled through the door, buzzed, in a tux from some gala, recounting an anecdote that Gilfoyle is not listening to. “What the fuck was what, I’m talking here—”

“I know. Pied Piper’s pinging Ahriman.”

“So?”

“Repeatedly. In patterns.”

Dinesh sighs, sinking down on the couch and taking his jacket off. “I know what this is. You feel left out because I went to the gala and _you_ were here, cowering in the dark with your machines, misshapen and unwanted by polite society. You want attention. I understand, Gilfoyle. I almost sympathise.”

“It’s a prime series. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13—”

“Yeah, I know what primes are.”

“Then you should find it interesting that a transmitter which normally emits _one_ ping per hour is suddenly emitting two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen of them.”

“Fine. Call Richard and find out. Maybe he’s working on something,” says Dinesh, losing interest as he gets up again. “There had better still be beer left.”

“I don’t drink that piss you like. I can’t call Dick.”

“Then it must be aliens,” Dinesh says, his head inside the fridge. “Is that where this is going?”

“The satellites are dead.”

“Yeah, because they live in a shitty backwater.”

“They’re all dead. At the same time.”

“Okay, Jodie Foster, so send some pings back. Be friendly, first contact is a big deal.”

“Maybe you should draft the greeting,” says Gilfoyle flatly. “I can’t imagine a finer intergalactic diplomat than you.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, I mean it.”

“So do I.”

Gilfoyle doesn’t respond for awhile, sitting in his desk chair with his arms folded, head bent to his chest, watching the pings hit the network. “Dick’s implant might be malfunctioning.”

That brings Dinesh up short, and he comes to look over Gilfoyle’s shoulder at the screens. “But Richard’s okay.”

“We don’t know that. He could be stroking out.”

“Can the implant do that?”

“Fuck if I know, I’m not a doctor. But this is weird. Hold on.” Gilfoyle taps a few lines into the prompt, then takes his hands abruptly away from the keyboard, as if it’s a Ouija board planchette that’s behaving erratically. Expressionless as always, but his speed gives him away. “No. I do not like this. At all.”

“What?”

“It’s _answering_ me. That’s binary, look, it’s—” He pulls up a converter. “Yeah. Straight-up sending text from inside his thick skull. He’s going to overheat it.”

“That’s…bad.” Dinesh is reading the screen. “Wow. That’s a classic Richard text message, all right.”

“Coordinates to eight decimal places, yeah.”

“Is he serious?”

Gilfoyle shrugs, types _what_ into the prompt, receives another flood of Richard’s nonsense. “Accident. Pied Piper’s gone. Cargoliner crash wiped the whole settlement out.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Jared’s alive. Some kids are with them.”

Dinesh takes a second to absorb that, but then smacks Gilfoyle on the shoulder. “Dude, we get to rescue a fucking planet.”

“I usually prefer to destroy planets.”

“Oh shut up, you teenage edgelord. I can’t believe how perfect this is. Richard was so sure that his big genius idea was going to be the thing that really changed the world. And I may be down here with you, but I am well into my third comma, Gilfoyle, so you know what? I’m leading this company just fine. _We’re_ the ones who get to pull _him_ out of the mud. It’s beautiful. Tell him we’re sending a ship. Juno-class, fastest in the fleet.” Dinesh is relishing every word, even if Gilfoyle won’t. “When Dinesh Chugtai rescues you from certain death, you ride in style.”

“This is the stupidest thing we’ve ever spent money on. Call whoever’s nearest and tell _them_ to send a ship.”

Dinesh accepts this concession to frugality with a wave of his hand. “Fucking…fine. But I’m going to be there when it lands on Earth, it’ll be an incredible photo-op. What about his company?”

Gilfoyle typed the question in. “Sounds like it’s gone,” he says when he reads the answer.

“The compound? The data?”

“Everything. Employees, other than Jared.”

“His data’s backed up, though.”

“Dick’s not _that_ dumb,” admits Gilfoyle.

“Then I want it,” says Dinesh, leaning over the desk to stare at the screen, his eyes shining. “Tell him we’ll come for him if he signs over all proprietary rights to Pied Piper’s tech. To us.”

“He never fixed the hardware issues with his tech, he couldn’t make it functional. He’s got nothing.”

“His data could still be worth billions—to someone else. Richard only needs one thing right now, and that’s a ship to Perdigon. Pied Piper’s price has never been lower. This is great for us. _All_ of us.”

“You are suggesting that we hold them hostage for tech that might not ever work.”

“First of all, why should you care?” says Dinesh. “Is it time for another Satanic moral lecture? Second of all, we started off together. I’m bringing Richard and Jared back into the fold. And I’ll be the CEO, and he won’t be able to throw childish temper tantrums about his precious artisanal handcrafted precog algorithm because it _won’t be his anymore._ Finally cutting the goddamn cord. He needs that, the company needs that, and Jared will never, ever make him do it. This will be the best thing that ever happened to Pied Piper.”

“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” says Gilfoyle. “I’m saying the tech doesn’t work. But you are the CEO, and I’m ecstatic to do your bidding.” He swivels in his chair to type in the offer. 

Pause. “He said yes.”

“ _Fuck_ , yes, I can’t believe it, I finally got that skinny little goblin—okay, okay, tell him we’re coming—wait,” says Dinesh, barely remembering in time. “Get a peppercorn from him.”

“What?”

“Symbolic payment. Legal thing, something has to change hands to prove his intent to make a deal with me. If he gives me anything in exchange, even one dollar, that counts. Can he do that on this connection?”

“He can authorise a payment if—”

In Dinesh’s tuxedo jacket pocket, his phone chimes. “That…was my banking app,” he says, beginning to be discomfited. He checks his phone’s screen. “One dollar.”

“He knew you’d ask.”

“Yeah, I did not miss this shit at all,” Dinesh drawls, looking at his bank app. “He knows he’s being creepy. But you know what? I just acquired a billion-dollar company and I’m not even sober.”

“Potentially billion-dollar.”

“Whatever.”

“Right now it’s just a big fuckin’ hole in the ground, but I mean…” Gilfoyle shrugs. “If it makes you happy.”

“It does, actually. I’m happy and you can’t do anything about it.”

“You just took your brother’s inheritance for the proverbial mess of pottage, but fine.”

“I don’t know what pottage is. I don’t care. I won.”

 

Richard breaks the connection and finds his body beaded with sweat, back at the abbey. Instant jackhammer migraine. He’s shuddering with the elevator-rise of nausea that means a seizure’s on its way. He slides out of his blanket nest to lie on the floor of the sanctuary, pressing his cheek to the cool stone. He doesn’t think he’s crying, but his eyes are watering profusely, without emotion.

Jared comes to his side, and presses his palm lightly across Richard’s forehead. As if to hold his thoughts in. “Breathe steady, okay? I’m right here, I’m right here…”

“I did it,” Richard whispers, but loses consciousness.

 

When he comes to, he has to break out his ASL, a language he learned poorly and uses rarely—a few words. Water, bed, pain. It’s useful when Richard’s brain refuses to let him speak.

He forms letters slowly with his fingers. Dinesh’s name.

“You found him?” Jared is holding Richard upright, helping him with a water bottle.

Richard nods. He gives up on ASL and segues into mime. Shapes a paper plane’s flight with his hands. 

“He’s coming. You’re sure? You spoke to him?”

Yes.

“When?”

Richard doesn’t know. S-O-O-N, he spells. Coordinates. Numbers are easier than letters.

Jared has a paper map of Perdigon that’s falling apart at the creases, but he finds the spot. “That’s a piece down the road,” he says. “But we have the bikes. We can start heading that way tomorrow…unless it’s not that soon?”

 _Tomorrow,_ Richard signs. _Go._

 

The coordinates take them to an empty field, solid ground underfoot, just off the highway. There’s a Scotch mist and everyone is miserable as usual in their swamp gear. The wind stings and makes your eyes well up with tears, so they pull up goggles and breathing apparatus while they wait. Shruti looks worn out, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, swaying on her feet as the toddlers pull at her pant legs. 

“If he’s wrong I’m going to kill him,” she says quietly to Jared.

She might not have to. Richard is in bad shape. He’s not sure where they are, and he can’t pass Jared’s tests: can’t name twenty things that you might find at a supermarket, can’t repeat a complex sentence, can’t pay attention, can’t remember his three words. _(Parachute, mansion, roses.)_ Something is wrong and Jared can’t fix it, or even name it. Everyone is depending on him and he’s not smart enough for this.

Time is passing and the kids are starting to whine, but then they all turn their heads and look up. (Richard doesn’t.) The big grey belly of a ship looms overhead.

The youngest ones start to cry, Will and Marty and Laura, triggered by the noise. Shruti bends over to hush them, drawing them close, but she looks over her shoulder to stare at Jared. “It’s here,” she yells over the sudden wind. “It’s here, we’re okay—”

“Wait,” Jared yells back, starting to back up, dragging Mars and Etienne by the collar. He sees the Hooli logo on the cargo bay doors. “No, no, wait…”

No one listens.

The ship lands. 

Coming down the plank, the crew look insect-like in their EV suits, tinted screens on their helmets, faceless. All in black. Six of them flank Gavin Belson himself, who stands at the open doors of the ship, hands spread, smiling.

“Happened to be in the neighbourhood,” said Gavin, striding down the plank with his goons. “Couldn’t help overhearing multiple distress calls. The Lumen always listens, you know, just like our ad campaigns say. I assumed that meant you’d be happy to see me—you are, aren’t you, Donald?”

Jared can’t speak. He’s holding onto Richard, and thinking that he can’t hold Richard up while also shielding him with his own body. After so many practice runs in his imagination.

“Hooli is exercising its right to salvage, under international planetary law. By accepting rescue, you agree to compensate us for the effort of…coming all this way.” Gavin smiles. “I can’t say it isn’t gratifying just to see your shining faces, but legally, I’m going to need a little more than that in return.”

“No.” Jared’s not trying to yell, wants to be calm, but his throat feels raw. They only needed a little more time, just long enough for Dinesh to send his ship, and instead Gavin’s here to sweep this little civilisation away. “No. No, you can’t—I won’t let you—”

One of the goons raises a weapon and Jared shoves Richard’s semi-conscious body to the ground, diving on top of him, grabbing for any of the kids he can reach. But there’s only a strange sound, _whffft-thunk_ , a dull blow and a pinprick in his shoulder.

“Tranq darts. Just for you, Donald. I know you let yourself get carried away,” says Gavin, bending over to give Jared a little wave. “Overprotective. It’s just business. Night-night, boys, talk later. Kids…children, please, stop crying…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literal translation for the quoted marching song: "Behold Caesar, now triumphant, who has conquered the Gauls; [and] Nicomedes, not triumphant, who has conquered Caesar..." If I had to give it as a rhyming couplet in English I might go with: "Caesar triumphant has fucked all of Gaul; Nicomedes fucked Caesar—no triumph at all!" 
> 
> ( _Subegit_ means to conquer or dominate, and also literally means to plough; the implication is the same as in English. Julius Caesar: bisexual power bottom.)


	6. cúchulainn's fight with the sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot of Gavin in this so...it's a bit triggery. [Chapter title reference.](https://stuffjeffreads.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/cuchulains-fight-with-the-sea-by-william-butler-yeats/)

Back at her condo, Monica kicks off her heels in the front hall and unhooks her bra under her sweater. She presses her thumb to the sensor on the Lumen panel by the door. _Welcome home, Monica,_ says the synthesised voice. Monica can’t stand hearing Gavin’s simulacrum talking to her in her own house, so she switched to “default female voice,” an uncredited voice actress who sounds really nice. Monica likes her. The actress, not the AI. _How do you feel today?_

“Fuck this.”

_We hear you. Let’s set your environmental settings to Fuck This (1)._ The Lumen dims the lights, warms the tiles in the kitchen, and starts a playlist of the songs Monica usually listens to when her BP’s slightly elevated and she starts to swear at the devices. Hooli algorithms keep track of that stuff. _Why not order from your favourite restaurant tonight? Wendy’s is still open and taking—_

“Wendy’s is not—okay, get my usual from them,” says Monica, walking on sore feet to her bedroom. She sheds her bra and rummages around in her drawers for her favourite t-shirt. The really good one. Random swag from a startup, the print washed off the tags—there’s no data left about which magical factory managed to make the best t-shirt in the history of human civilisation. There’s also no way to get more of them, and this solitary specimen is getting holes and ketchup stains now. It can’t last. T-shirts of the floating world. “And call Dinesh.”

_We see you’ve got your shirt off. Do you want that to be an audio call to Dinesh Chugtai?_

Monica rolls her eyes. “Yeah, audio call, I don’t cam for free.” She finishes getting into her pajamas as the Lumen places the call.

Dinesh takes a few minutes before he deigns to reply; he doesn’t like to seem easy to get hold of. But he answers. “Monica, what’s up, I have some very serious news—”

“In a minute. You know those really obnoxious little personal spacecraft that used to be everywhere? Zorya Interceptors, they were Russian. Gilf had one but he sold it.”

“What?”

“They were murder on battery power but they pretty much never broke down. I _think_ they took M-fuel, but don’t quote me. Still, you could take them really far out if you were good about charging every night. My friends took theirs from Nephele to Lacombe last summer—”

“Monica, I don’t have time for chitchat,” Dinesh says importantly. “I have very important—I would say, even tragic news.”

“Richard and Jared are marooned on Perdigon.”

“Oh, fuck _off_. Are you—how do you already know?” Dinesh demands. “Did he go to you first?”

“First of all, Dinesh, please grow up. Second, Richard sent a message to Laurie, apparently right before the impact. _She_ didn’t think it was a big deal, so I just found out about it. Hang on, pause convo.”

The delivery guy is here with Wendy’s, so Monica goes to pay him. When she unpauses the Lumen call, Dinesh is rambling aloud to somebody, possibly Gilfoyle. “I can’t believe it. I can’t. How did he do this, how was this—oh my God…”

“Okay, back. What’s going on?” says Monica as she sits down on the couch with her food. “Dinesh, I actually did mean to call about the Zorya Inceptors. Can I still nab one cheap off a secondary market? I’d just get berths on a regular spaceliner but the spaceport on Perdigon must be flattened, so I need something that can land on rough ground.”

“Wait, you called because you want a ship?”

“You know how to fly?” says Gilfoyle, who must be in the room after all.

“Basically, yeah. I just have my G-class license but I could handle this. I want to go buzz the wreckage and see if it’s true, so that I can tell Laurie.”

“No,” says Dinesh. “Turn on the news.”

Monica suspects that Dinesh is just grasping at straws—anything so that he can be the bearer of dramatic news—but this time he’s for real. On the BBC World News, there’s Gavin Belson bringing children in stretchers onto a ship. Helping with his own hands, being waved away by medics, smiling for the cameras. Poor Jared is asleep on a gurney, twisted in a thin blanket, gaunt and pale even by Jared standards, sedated. _Former Hooli employees rescue children from disaster._

She only gets one glimpse of Richard, who as usual has some kind of anti-charisma on camera—when he fucks up it’s hard to look away, and he’s always fucking up. He’s lost weight and let his beard grow out, and his stare looks unhinged, all of which is understandable in this situation, but the effect is Rasputin at best and Charlie Manson at worst. “I gotta make sure PR sends some better clips of Richard,” says Monica. “Maybe get them to stop running this one.”

“ _Are_ there any better clips of Richard?” Gilfoyle asks.

“He’s been okay sometimes. Look at the kids holding onto Jared’s hands, oh my God. This is heartbreaking.”

“Yeah, real nice. It looks incredible,” says Dinesh, who sounds pained. “That could’ve been me holding Jared’s hands, it _should’ve_ been me. Gavin looks like Mother Teresa, walking in there and singlehandedly saving everyone’s life. I needed one more day and I could’ve been there.”

Monica is not unsympathetic to Dinesh’s ambitions, and sometimes she likes letting him vent; getting in that headspace can be cathartic. Tonight, though, it’s too much. “Well, he got there first. So what? He _did_ save their lives. Even for the wrong reasons. That still counts, even for soulless husks like us, right?”

“Everyone’s a soulless husk,” says Gilfoyle. “Since souls don’t exist. Here’s my problem with all this. It says that Hooli heard a distress signal. But Dick went straight to Ahriman, and the only other signals he sent were to Laurie and to the head of the Benedictines in Rome. An ansible is the most secure form of communication, unless someone gets hold of the paired device. There’s no transmission of data in a signal from point A to point B—that’s why it’s instantaneous. Gavin _couldn’t_ have intercepted the ansible to Rome or the pings to Ahriman. Don’t know the specs on his message to Laurie, though. He might have used any comm channel for that.”

“So?” says Monica, working on her fries as she listens and watches the news. “Everyone’s got a Lumen in their house. We all know those things report back to HQ. Hooli could have overheard any one of us talking about Pied Piper.”

“You know that because you’re smart,” says Gilfoyle. “And I know that because _I’m_ smart, and Dinesh knows that because I told him. Other people just live their lives and try not to think about the corporate AI that’s wired into their houses. They think you’re some kind of nutcase if you say it’s not safe, and they just ask if you’ve seen _Losing Julie’s Place_ or _The Uptake_ and you have to say no, those are Lumen Originals, and do I look like I watch the fucking _Uptake_? I do _not._ ” He pauses. “But it’s still technically illegal, if you’re rich enough to fight in court. I believe the term is corporate espionage.”

“ _Losing Julie’s Place_ is really good. But who exactly is Gavin depriving? And how do you quantify it? Like, Gavin scooped Dinesh on a Good Samaritan call and got some nice PR.” Monica shrugs as she eats. “He probably did eavesdrop on one of us, but what are the real damages to you? Gavin’s the one who had to pay for the rescue operation.”

There’s a slight pause, and Dinesh says, “That’s not quite the issue.”

Monica sighs. “What did you guys do?”

“Richard…started making contact with Ahriman three days ago,” says Dinesh slowly. “Using his implant, just pinging the network again and again until Gilfoyle noticed. He told us what had happened. I was going to send a ship to…do exactly what Gavin’s doing right now. Like this is exactly how I pictured it. So I asked Richard for a payment to seal the deal. He sent me a dollar.”

“A dollar for what?”

“The proprietary rights to any and all technologies developed by Pied Piper, past and present, in perpetuity.”

Monica’s frowning as she listens, watching the news run archival clips about Pied Piper. Richard with the Zener cards, the rickety beginnings of Anton and Aleister, Jared breaking the ground on the Perdigon site. “He went along with that?”

“Without a peep. It’s his language, even, he put it in the bank transfer note.”

“I think you guys need to talk to Ron,” says Monica. Richard must have a plan. He wouldn’t give up his baby for no reason. It’s another Almond Joy. “Because you might have something there, but it’ll be up to you guys to defend it. Why would you _do_ that and not call Laurie and me right away?”

“It was going to be big news! I didn’t want to leak it,” says Dinesh, although he sounds like he knows he fucked up. “I thought Laurie would yell at me.”

“She will, because you don’t threaten her investments.” Monica isn’t going to waste energy being mad at Dinesh for this. Richard too. Poor communication, high-handedness, conducting business like a pirate—Laurie will be the one to voice all that. Let her be the bad guy. “If you want to take on the full financial burden of rebuilding that company, _literally_ from a pile of rubble, knock yourselves out. You’ve got Prima Donna Hendricks on board. Laurie doesn’t care who runs the company as long as a product gets to market and it sells. Pied Piper could do a lot worse, and they still might. But get ahead of this, Dinesh, okay? Call Ron. Make sure this claim is legit.”

“Yeah, well, I will,” says Dinesh. “And we’ll get a product to market when _I’m_ in charge. Richard and Jared have been up there on Frog Planet all this time, spinning their wheels, marketing themselves like ass, getting nowhere. They need us.”

“Dude, I’m not even sure that you’re wrong, but have your whole winter-of-our-discontent thing on your own time. Meanwhile I have to figure out which Hooli outpost is playing host for Jared and Richard,” says Monica. “They should be under our roof, not Hooli’s. Safest that way.”

“Agreed,” says Gilfoyle. “But I’ll save you the search. Jared and Richard are at PPLOS Siddhartha. Private orbital station owned by Hooli. That’s what Ahriman says, anyway.”

“Really? He’s getting fast.”

It’s difficult to detect pride and joy in Gilfoyle’s monotone, but it’s there. “Sweeps the net clean in picoseconds. Ahriman’s gonna swallow the Lumen’s market. Jonah inside the whale.”

“You know, Calvinists say the whale is a symbol for God’s irresistible grace,” Monica says, just to bug him. “A purgatorial experience to set Jonah on the path of righteousness.”

“Then clearly,” says Gilfoyle, “that is not the story to which I meant to allude.”

 

Richard awakes in a place that’s already familiar to him from visions: the yellow room. Maybe it’s just the light; he doesn’t know what planet this is, but it’s _bright_ , a furious saffron-coloured sky. Great, calming colour scheme. Just the place for some fucking glass walls and shag carpeting, Richard thinks. His skull is pulsating, his eyes watering involuntarily. Is it the light?

Gavin’s figure looks dark and small in the bright room, pacing aimlessly, and the movement reminds Richard of the floaters he gets in his field of vision sometimes. The doctor’s said they’re nothing to worry about yet. Call if they become numerous. 

Richard’s ears are ringing and he can’t hear whatever Gavin’s saying. “I’m sorry,” he finally says, whether or not Gavin’s still talking. “I need—listen. Not to sound like a drug-seeker, but I need some drugs here.”

Gavin approaches, crosses the personal boundary line, and puts his hand to Richard’s forehead. He tisks. “The younger generation,” he says. “But I don’t want to be a bad host. Lumen, increase dosage.”

“Wait—” says Richard, because he’s only just discovered the catheter in the vein on the underside of his wrist. It’s a sleek apparatus like a silicon wristband, only a little painful when jostled. At Gavin’s command it releases something into his bloodstream. It feels cool and heavy, and tastes silvery at the back of his throat.

The pain goes away. If there are side effects, Richard barely notices them. He sags back on the couch, and the relief makes him break out in a sweat. “What did you do to me?”

“We disconnected that thing in your head. All you’ve got is what Mother Nature gave you.” Gavin smiles, sitting down opposite Richard. “Which I’m sure was quite a talent. You could’ve had a whole career. Baseball scores. Telling fortunes at a carnival. Consultancy.”

“Gavin, what—where are the kids?”

“Your Dickensian urchins? They’re fine. Lumen, let’s roll some _news clips_ of _Hooli_ rescue mission to _Perdigon_ , please.” Gavin is really hitting the keywords hard. Maybe that’s the key to getting the voice search to work, Richard thinks. 

The Lumen projects a screenful of search results, which all look jubilant. Gavin the hero. But Shruti doesn’t seem to be blinking in Morse code or anything; she looks fed up with cameras, but she also seems to have had some square meals and some sleep. _Meet Shruti Agnihotri, the 19-year-old developer who survived incredible odds to_ — _‘We thought we would die there,’ say survivors_ — _How private industry saved the day when colonial government oversight failed to_ —

“Okay, stop…clicking,” says Richard. He slides down from the couch to sit on the floor, folding his arms on an ebony coffee table to rest his cheek against the cool wood. “You sent them back to Earth. Right?”

“Hooli connected most of them with living relatives on Earth. Two came up with nothing—”

“Océane and Etienne.”

“They’re under Ms. Agnihotri’s guardianship temporarily. But we think they still have a second cousin in New York. Human research teams are on the case, not just bots. We’re gonna get to the bottom of this.”

“Uh-huh, yup, that was really good news face,” Richard says, relieved but refusing to show it. “Virtuous. Good job. What do you want, Gavin?”

“Are you familiar with the maritime laws of salvage?”

 

Opining on that very topic is Ron LaFlamme: 

“Now, this shit is _ancient_ law. Anyone who rescues a merchant ship in peril on the sea _is_ entitled to a reward, commensurate with the value of the cargo saved. Traditionally we don’t put value on human lives, but legal precedent says that if someone faces a real-life trolley problem where they could either save the crew or the cargo but not both—we gotta reward people for making the right call. Pirates are not just an old meme, gang. In space flight they’re a very real concern, and laws like these discourage them.

“So, the way this _should_ work is that your Good Samaritan shows up, voluntarily helps to save your stuff from destruction, and does…well, let’s say a half-decent job or better. He makes some kind of positive difference. Both you and G.S. then head to a court or arbitrator, which determines the reward G.S. will get. The more he helps, the more he gets. 

“If this sounds like a bad deal, you _do_ have the right to refuse help from G.S. You might turn down a rescue attempt if you already have a deal with a professional salvage company, for instance. This includes stuff like a Personal Spaceflight Association membership, if Pied Piper had one—no? Gotcha, good to know. 

“You’re probably asking yourself: does this even apply to Perdigon? It’s a planet, not a ship. The only ship in the equation is the _Handsome Lake_ , which is kaput. And maritime salvage laws don’t apply to terrestrial rescue. You help someone on dry land, you’re not taking the same risks as someone who has to take his boat off-course and put his ass on the line. But courts have been finding that colonies in extreme isolation may present just as much risk to our buddy G.S., so the case law leans toward applying maritime principles in space rescue situations. Such as these.

“Of course, all this assumes no contractual obligations. Someone signs a contract, that could change everything. Dinesh. Chugmeister. Buddy. Listen to me. Get a passenger pigeon to Siddhartha Station, wherever the fuck that is, and tell Richie not to sign _anything_ while he’s in custody at Gavin’s Willy-Wonka Chocolate Factory. Okay? Same goes for Jared. 

“Because right now, the sequence of events is that Richie gave the rights to you, and wrote down his intent, and sent a symbolic payment as consideration for the promise of rescue. That _is_ a contract, but it’s a very short and vague one. It will need to be interpreted by a court. And as your attorney, the interpretation I will coax them to adopt is that Pied Piper _is already_ yours. It became yours at the moment when Richie gave you that dollar. If we get that on paper pronto, we got a chance. Then it won’t matter what Gavin makes them sign—Richie can’t give something away if it isn’t his anymore. _Nemo dat quod non habet_ , we say in lawyer-talk. Means you can’t give what you don’t have.”

 

Richard has been waiting for this, and even though physically he feels like creamed garbage, it’s a sweet moment: “Gavin, I already signed the company over to Dinesh Chugtai. Before you even set foot on that planet. You came just in time. And you were still too late.”

It’s like throwing a rock at a dictator’s statue. Satisfying, not useful. Gavin blinks out of rhythm, a sign of impact, but he keeps smiling. “The company? No. I don’t want the tech. It doesn’t work, does it?”

“Well—”

“It doesn’t. Work,” Gavin repeats, and he comes over to sit cross-legged on the floor with Richard, half-lotus. “It’s like a flying machine built by Leonardo da Vinci. Interesting? Absolutely. Well-made? I’d expect nothing less. But does it fly? Of course not.”

For the past few years, Richard hasn’t had to be defensive about his abilities. No tests were able to find fault with him, in any laboratory setting. Pied Piper got the Randi Foundation money, even. “The new prototypes don’t work—listen—they don’t _work_ because consumers won’t tolerate the side effects. The slightest thing goes wrong, people panic. I saw a test user freak out because the highest setting made her smell burnt toast. Like, really? Sorry that this…this advancement of human consciousness is kind of painful. Welcome to my life, ha. But the thing in my head works, Gavin. That’s why we’re here.”

“Really? Because I’m going to go out on a limb here, Hendricks: a product that gives the user violent convulsions several times per week is a bad product.”

“Yup. Well. I guess that’s Dinesh’s problem now.”

“Maybe so.” Gavin smiles, lips tight. “It’s a big burden off my shoulders, honestly. What I want is very simple. Hasn’t really changed since the first time we talked, in fact.”

“Can we just. The point,” says Richard. “Can we get to it?”

“Seeing as your company is a smoking ruin on a planet whose human inhabitants now number zero, I’d like to throw Hooli’s hat back in the ring. Bidding for your talents, Hendricks. You can have a lifelong career of comfort, peace, and agency as Hooli’s permanent futurist and trendspotter.”

“I already heard this speech. Your whole temptation-in-the-wilderness thing, which—which you do because you’re…the devil,” Richard says, trailing off as he decides that the comparison is melodramatic. “Look, the first day you called me into your office to talk about Pied Piper, the _first_ time, you waved this offer in my face. Like you thought you could take advantage of the freaky rube from middle America.”

“Richard!” It’s hard to tell if Gavin’s laughter is forced; he’s very well-practiced. “Wow. This is some serious stuff you’ve been carrying around! I had no idea you felt that way. Just gotta correct you on some facts. One. I have _never_ tried to take advantage of you. I’ve always offered you extremely generous employment packages. Two.” He leans closer to Richard, dipping his head to make eye contact. “I saved your life. You little prick. Okay? I saved your life. I saved your husband’s life. I saved eleven children and one innocent young woman. Look at me. You don’t get to call me the devil.”

Richard is seething. He pulls himself backward on the rug, away from Gavin. “Have you—God, it’s always—do you know what you’re asking? After years of, of scheming to get your way, do you even know how it would end for you?”

“That’d be your job.”

“Then I’ll give you one for free. Here’s a fact: my tech does work. Yeah. I almost wish it doesn’t, but it does. And maybe Tammy in Kansas City isn’t going to be a buyer because the headaches are a drag. Cool. Awesome. Corporate and industrial buyers won’t give a shred of a fuck what the side effects are, and _they_ will buy. They will buy thousands and thousands of implants, they will test thousands and thousands of job candidates—anywhere desperate, doesn’t matter. Indentured servitude’s legal again in the South, and all those ghost stories down there must mean something, right? Population could have latent ability. Test ’em. Anyone who can pass the test for a base level of psionic power gets the implant. And if the implants give occasional seizures to your entire workforce, no prob. Expected behaviour. The numbers will tell you it’s still worth it, and you’ll listen to the numbers.”

“And?” Gavin demands. “You’re the one who called it an advancement of human consciousness. We’re bringing it to the masses. That’s what you wanted to do with Pied Piper, isn’t it?”

“What, enslave people for a corporate telepathic panopticon? No, that’s not what I wanted to do with my fucking company, Gavin. I wanted it to become _normal._ ” Richard wraps his arms around his knees in front of him. The drugs, whatever they are, sing in his veins. 

“In the future I wanted,” Richard says, “the future is just another thing you learn to ignore. A thousand years ago, it was impossible for a human being in Paris to know what was happening in Beijing. That would have been a wizard power. Like scrying. Now it’s not. We don’t even care. We tune that shit out. What if precog tech could be like that? Like a phone, like the Internet, like the Lumen. Useful in an emergency, fun when you’re bored, distracting when you need to concentrate. Some people use it all the time, they love it, and some people don’t get the jokes and punctuate their texts weirdly.”

“But that’s what I want too,” Gavin says softly. “Just…with the addition that some of those people—the ones with exceptional promise, the ones with greater interest in the possibilities of the human mind— _they_ could do it for a living. Doing what you love. Isn’t that what’s really important in life?”

“Uh-huh. And some of those amazing gifted people might want to ‘do what they love’ in fields like private security, stock trading, espionage, military contracting—”

“Exactly,” Gavin says, as if consoling him. “People get jobs in those fields all the time. Who am I to judge? Sounds exciting.”

The two of them fall silent. Richard has foreseen this conversation dozens of times over now. It always splits here, a natural caesura. There is one train of thought in Gavin’s head that can make an ugly future, and Gavin may or may not follow it. You can find seams like this everywhere, if you look for them, from one second to the next. 

Jared drops his keys on the morning of their wedding, and he says _butterfingers_ because of course he does, and thus delays them getting to the car by three seconds, averting major disaster.

Monica passes by six vending machines every day on her way to work. Only two of those six sell Almond Joys; only one of those is a desirable location, while the other is beside a doubtful alley. If she stops by the good vending machine for at least thirty seconds, she doesn’t run into her ex-husband on the train. Doesn’t spend a weekend crying. This probably has some effect on business or whatever, but mostly—the guy seems like an asshole. Monica’s better off with the Almond Joy.

Sometimes, when all the factors are right, you can tilt the pinball machine. But Richard fails at that game a lot.

 

“Were you a weird kid?” Gavin asks him.

Definitely going in this direction. Okay. Richard rests his chin on his knees. “I mean—yeah. Of course.”

“I was a weird kid. I mean I never had any experiences like yours. Nothing spooky. But my grandmother, my—no, my great-aunt. She saw a ghost once.”

“Who?”

“My great-aunt.”

“No, who was the ghost?”

“I don’t think anyone knew,” says Gavin. He picks up his tablet to summon some water, then upgrades the selection to a tea service. “A boy who’d been shot in the head. She could see the wound.”

People tell Richard stories like this. He tries to discourage it. “Sounds metal.”

“She wasn’t making it up. But every family’s got something like that, right?”

Gavin has tried to probe Richard about his family history before. Richard tries to discourage that too. “Yeah. Well. I come from very—very ordinary stock. So.”

“Stock from where, where do they come from?”

“England. It’s boring.”

“Aha. That makes perfect sense to me, you know. Druids on Salisbury Plain.”

“Farmers in Yorkshire, but okay.”

“I just don’t see how that can be true,” says Gavin, with wounded earnestness. “Your abilities surfaced in early childhood. It’s not a learned skill. It was present even before the implant surgery. There was no trauma or environmental change associated with the onset. You must have inherited it.”

Richard takes refuge in science. “I guess, man, but genetics is weird. And as for creepy grandmas with like, one glass eye and a cat that won’t stop staring at you—or whatever you’re looking for—I wouldn’t fucking know. Okay? My parents taught at the University of Liverpool and they left because campus was underwater in 2065. I’ve never been there, I’ve never met any relatives—my family just isn’t that tight.”

“You and Jared ever talk about having kids? Test tube style?” asks Gavin, undeterred. “You must have thought about it. Those kids on Perdigon seemed crazy about Jared.”

“They love him. Jared’s the good cop.”

“You must have wanted…” Gavin pours out some green tea into each cup, passes one to Richard. “I mean, if it were me, going through something like that—it would make me think. About my legacy.”

“We never really talked about having biological kids.” This is none of Gavin’s business, but Richard knows that getting evasive will only hasten the inevitable. He takes the cup and sets it down on the coffee table untouched. “If we were gonna take that on, we’d adopt a kid. Someone older. Because of Jared’s whole…y’know.”

“That’s very noble. Maybe this is an age thing,” says Gavin with a contemplative air. “You’re still young, but when I turned 39, I started thinking a lot about future generations. All my genetic material, everything that made me who I am today—just think of all those organisms that survived incredible odds just to reproduce. Is that all just going to culminate in my existence? The last of my line?”

“Tragic, sure. Yup. You should totally do the test tube thing,” Richard says. “Or cloning. You seem like a clone guy.”

“Nah, I hate the owner of Poriyot Labs,” says Gavin. “So cloning isn’t really on my agenda. Although, I gotta say, as a reproductive method I like it. Why should I have to vet some woman’s DNA just to make sure my genes live on? Right? Like people say it’s narcissistic to go with cloning and that’s just stupid.” Gavin solicits Richard’s agreement with a laugh, and gets a weak one in return. “It’s not like he’d be a copy of me. Other than genetically. I could do twins, even, if I hired enough staff. That way they wouldn’t feel so isolated.”

“Maybe you should bury the hatchet with Poriyot, then.”

“Mm. See, what I’d rather do,” says Gavin, “is start a Hooli genetic program. Doesn’t that just make more sense? We can really add to the, the body of scientific knowledge with this. Whatever structural differences your brain has, we can isolate the genetic cause.”

That’s the seam Richard’s been waiting for. “Please don’t,” he murmurs.

“Think about it. What’s the scariest thing, when you imagine having kids?” Gavin says. “Raising them. Right? Specifically, raising them wrong. Fucking them up. You won’t have to worry about that. Your genes—some of them, at least—will go on. Fewer responsibilities.”

“So someone else fucks them up instead of me.”

“You’re joking, but think about Jared. The things he’s been through would fuck anyone up. And most people…come on. You know this is true. Most people whose parents can’t love them right—they turn into freaks like you and me.”

“Gavin.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell. I know,” says Gavin. “From the things you haven’t said. Remember when I saw you in the bathroom that morning, when we were going to court the first time? You were using your phone to look up instructions to the half-Windsor. I looked at you and I thought—that’s a man whose father never taught him how. Parents fail their kids. And not everybody can be on Jared’s level. I kept tropical fish as a kid. I knew everything about tropical fish. You know how you need snails in a fish-tank? The snail eats all this toxic material, dead plant matter, leftover food, the garbage, and keeps the tank clean. Jared does that. He takes shit and turns it to gold. The more shit, the more gold. But he’s special. Most of us don’t turn shit into anything. Most of us just produce it.”

Richard slumps against the bottom of the couch. He doesn’t want to listen to this. It’s a psych-out and he knows that it is, but he also knows that at least some of these ideas are going to sink into his head and get into regular rotation. “It’s not—it’s special, but it’s not _rare_. My parents did fine, anyhow. Not with knot lessons, I guess, but everything else was okay. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Mm, good. Loyalty’s a nice quality.” Gavin’s still smiling. “You never invited me to the wedding, you know. I never got to say mazel tov to Jared. That didn’t seem fair to me, considering I introduced you.”

“You tried to sue me for hiring him.”

“Richard, this is business. Okay? It’s not a sock-hop. But I did introduce you. Jared came to me with this random developer’s passion project—Pied Piper is still the worst name I’ve ever heard for a startup—and I was the one who said, ‘we have to get this guy in for a meeting.’ He had no idea who you were. He was only interested in the tech. You two wouldn’t have met if not for me.”

“Well, the wedding’s been over for awhile, so I don’t know how I can rectify that missing invitation, Gavin,” Richard says. He can’t see any further into the future now that they’ve crossed over that seam; he feels blind, the implant a dead piece of steel and plastic inside his skull. “What do you want from me here?”

“Trust. Little bit of it.” Gavin refills his cup from the Japanese stoneware teapot. “I want what’s best for you both. I think it’s very romantic, a real Hooli love story. Because—and forgive me for assuming—you must have foreseen it. Right?”

“Of course.” This is public knowledge, an anecdote they tell in interviews. Humanising. So Richard’s been told. “I knew before I met him. That he was going to be…I knew who he was.”

Richard went through puberty with his abilities—he foresaw everything there was to foresee while jerking off in the shower. When he would lose his virginity, when he would have the best sex of his life, when he would have the hottest partner, when it would happen next, and next, and next…

It was also how he learned to delude himself about certain things. But when he first met Jared at Hooli he _remembered_ that face, he knew it. He knew Jared’s face.

“Soulmates,” Gavin remarks.

“That shit’s not real.”

“No?”

Richard shrugs. “Far as I can tell. I think it would show statistically, since it’s such a dramatic purported effect. But people get lots of chances to fall in love. I don’t even…I don’t get why people want it to be true. I guess is the thing. Like why would that be good?”

“You’re not a romantic.”

“Nope.”

“Jared is.”

“Yeah, he is.” Richard has never asked Jared for details about what went on between him and Gavin; Jared, characteristically, sometimes shares them anyway. Richard hates that Gavin knows this stuff, wants to wipe that smug little grin off his face. As if he could. “I like it when he talks about soulmates and fate, whatever, it’s cute. I just don’t agree.”

“You don’t believe in fate either?”

Richard doesn’t like this question. “Well…”

“Come on.”

“I don’t really like any of the words people use. It’s frustrating to talk about,” says Richard. He adds, “I don’t see the point, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not going to listen, so why am I bothering to tell you anything?” Richard has reached the limits of his patience. “You won’t listen and you won’t understand. This shit is beyond you, Gavin.”

That blow lands. Gavin’s lips thin out. “That so?”

“Yeah.”

“Try me.”

Richard gets up from his cross-legged position, going to the window for the first time. This is an orbital station, not a planet; what he took for a yellow sky is actually a heavyweight UV filter that’s struggling to hold back the light of a nearby sun. Even through the filter, the light is oppressive. The headache is still lurking behind his eyeballs, ready to expand to the dimensions of its container. 

“We told stories on Perdigon,” he says. Everything feels different with the implant out of commission. He’s not sure if he’s weaker or stronger. “No Lumen Originals to binge on. We’re really behind on _Losing Julie’s Place._ But we made our own fun. I told the kids this story—I remember it from my reader in third grade. I was ahead of the others so they gave me the Ulster Cycle, like ‘good luck with this, kid.’ The death of Cúchulainn. You know this story?”

“Tell me,” says Gavin.

“The guy was a great warrior, a king’s champion. Great at killing, not too bright. When he’s still just a kid, he’s told never to eat the meat of a dog—I know, yeah. It’s like Samson and his hair, a vow he took that gives him special strength. But Cúchulainn has a team of six druids against him—and _they’re_ out for blood because he killed their dad. So the king of Ulster tries to keep Cúchulainn from finding out about this vendetta, distracting him with music and partying. Doesn’t work. Cúchulainn’s horse, Lia Macha, shies away from him on the morning of battle. Doesn’t stop him. His mother tries to offer him a cup of wine for good luck, and the wine turns to blood. Doesn’t stop him. He meets the banshees at the river, who straight up say that they’re washing the bloodstains off his armour because he’s destined to die today. My man still doesn’t turn back.”

“Cú—this guy doesn’t get the feeling that something’s gonna go wrong?” asks Gavin, giving up on pronouncing the hero’s name.

“We don’t know what he feels,” says Richard with a shrug. “But yeah, these aren’t subtle omens. He meets three old women. They’re roasting a dog on a spit over the fire—look, I didn’t make this up,” says Richard, when Gavin makes a face. “Poor people ate dog, it’s a worldbuilding detail, just deal with it. These three old women invite Cúchulainn to sit and eat with them. Now, Cúchulainn may not be too swift, but he’s in an Irish myth and even _he_ knows it’s a bad idea to be rude to three old women at the same time. Like, they’re definitely some kind of goddess. This is a test. Obviously. So he doesn’t want to say no, acting like he’s too good to eat dog meat. He opts to eat the dog.”

Richard stops there, and after a moment Gavin prompts him: “Then what?”

“Then he dies. He gets to the battlefield and the druids kill his charioteer, they kill his horse, they kill him. In that order. Exactly as the prophecy said.”

“Why wouldn’t he stop?”

Richard snorts. “No kidding, huh? You tell me. But here’s a different question. If he had stopped at any of those omens—if he hadn’t eaten the meat—would it have helped? Or did it go all the way back to the moment he killed the druids’ father? Or earlier? There were prophecies when he was seven years old that his life would be short. When exactly do you intervene, if you want to save this meathead’s stupid life? How, when none of the signs he got made him stop? And who has the right to interfere?”

“You intervene all the time,” says Gavin. “You must think you deserve to make those decisions for people.” 

“You’re not listening.” Richard rests his forehead against the glass for a moment; it’s warm from the light of the orange sun outside. “Ahriman’s gonna swallow you. Every dollar you have will be in someone else’s pocket. This genetic program will create a new class of labour and you won’t be able to control them.” After a moment, he adds, “Nobody’s ever going to fall in love with you, either. You die alone. Massive stroke. I won’t tell you when exactly. But it’s sooner than you think.”

“Sure. Nice try, Hendricks,” says Gavin, getting to his feet. “But you’re not gonna freak me out with this act.”

Richard doesn’t turn back to look at him. He’s looking out at a multilevel parking-lot just inside the cavity of a loading dock, crawling with unmanned vehicles. This whole thing is sort of funny, he thinks, but he doesn’t laugh. “Exactly,” he says.

 

Jared’s in a blue room. Institutional grey, mostly, but the floor tiles are blue, streaked with white like they’re supposed to be marble. There’s a bluish-white LED overhead and he can see his own veins. He’s got a medi-port around the left wrist, but no physical restraints. _Not doing so badly after all, are you, Donald?_

The door opens, and Jared leaps to such a level of alertness that the whole incident eludes his memory. That’s what he thinks must have happened, anyway—he experiences only a brief lapse of awareness, and then his attention returns to the blue room. Gavin is here, in real life, and Jared’s on his feet with his heart pounding, breathing hard.

Has he said anything? Done anything?

The medi-port on his wrist releases something cold and grey into his bloodstream, and Jared sinks down, folding into a crouch on the floor. “What is this?” 

“Specialty of the house,” says Gavin, and he’s helping Jared sit down on the floor. Being gentle, that game of his. “Hooli Pharma launches next year. Don’t tell the press I said so,” he adds with a wink. “How’ve you been, Donald?”

“It’s Jared now.” Jared says it as he would say it to himself, inside his head: firm, not unkind. “I’ve been…trapped on a wrecked colony, mostly.”

“Ah.”

“Not good.”

“I see. I bet you were glad to see that ship,” says Gavin.

And Jared thinks…can that be true? Was he glad to see it? Did he just get overexcited, as he often does? No. Why even wonder that? How many of these floorboards are rotten underfoot? “We were waiting for someone else.”

“Dinesh Chugtai.” Gavin has bothered to learn that name. He never mistakes Richard’s name, either. “Your old buddy. That would’ve been a great news story, huh? Heartwarming stuff. Two great inventors have a falling out, years pass, and then one of them’s in big trouble, and only his old rival can save him. Luckily, Hendricks has a lot of rivals.”

“Where’d you take him?” A single drop of sweat is working its way down Jared’s spine. “Where have you put him—where are the kids?”

“Easy, easy. Lumen, increase dosage. The kids are on Earth, you can read the news for yourself. Richard’s just upstairs on level nine, no big deal. I have some paperwork for you, Donald, and I also wanted to say, y’know, congratulations on the wedding.”

“Right,” says Donald, reviving a bit at the mention of paperwork. He gets up—silly to be sitting on the floor when a table and chairs are right here. “I’m sorry, I’m…goodness, what a lot of fuss. Let’s sit down. Everything’s okay. What paperwork is this, Gavin? I’m so sorry, you shouldn’t have had to come down here yourself.”

“I said congratulations on the wedding, Donald. Mazel tov. You’re a mazel tov guy, aren’t you, Donald?”

“Only on both sides, sir. Thank you very much, though. What did you want me to sign, sir?”

“Yeah, I congratulated Richard too. It’s funny, he had totally forgotten that I was the one who introduced you two. Remember?” says Gavin, nodding at Donald. “You showed me that little project that Hendricks was wasting his time on. I called the meeting.”

“Yes sir, you did…call the meeting,” says Donald. Prey species understand this part: you hold still in the grass. “What did you want me to sign, sir?”

Gavin smiles and slides a thick stapled document across the table to him. “This is just to authorise compensation for the rescue workers who’ve been searching the wreckage.”

“Mm-hm.” Donald Dunn does not sign documents hastily. He begins to page through it. “I may need some time to go over this, I’m afraid, sir.”

“That’s fine. I’ve got some space in my schedule today. Just for you two. We’re very excited to have your husband on board, you know.”

Donald doesn’t raise his head, but looks up at Gavin. “I’m sorry?”

“Richard’s already signed. Look.”

Gavin turns to the last page, but Jared takes it out of his hands, turning away to spread the pages out in his lap. 

Does he really know Richard’s signature beyond doubt? Yes, Jared does. Richard’s handwriting is variable from day to day, depending on his health, but it has unchanging elements: the Greek shape of his d’s, a backwards drag to the letters, and the ponderous tittles over the two i’s in his name, where he first forgets to dot them, then returns to ink the dots in heavily.

“You could have faked this,” says Jared.

“I didn’t have to. That’s ridiculous, Donald. Listen, I just want you to know that my heart goes out to the two of you, okay? It’s rough to lose a company, especially…I mean, that’s never happened to me. Nevertheless. You’ll have a very comfortable accommodation budget, and please, feel free to pick anywhere in Hoolispace to settle down. You know our campus on Earth, obviously, but we’ve also got territory on Nephele, Keto, Phrixus, Concordia, Ararat, Iram—”

“Richard would never agree to work for you.”

“—one new colony on Lacombe, two on Brébeuf, and now, of course, Perdigon. That’s a rough climate out there. Some of that gas got in my _mouth_ , can you believe that? Tastes like shit. But once we get some compounds built and rebuilt, the outside atmo won’t be a big deal.”

Jared interrupts again. “Gavin. Richard would never agree to this. And I’m not signing a document of, of this length and complexity without—I want a lawyer. I’m not signing without a lawyer. And I want to see my husband.”

“Fine. Personally, my pick is Ararat. Fantastic spaces, some really great restaurant scenes. But definitely you’ll want to settle on Nephele if you like the beach. You don’t look like you like the beach.”

“You can’t shame me into disregarding skin cancer risks. You can’t… _do_ what you’re trying to do, Gavin,” Jared says, gripping the edge of the table. “Do you think I don’t know what Richard’s like? He didn’t sign this, and if he did—if he did—”

“What?”

“He had a good reason. If he did.”

“Then you should fall in line with whatever he’s planning,” says Gavin. “Shouldn’t you?”

Jared lets out a sound he used to make when he worked for Hooli—a sigh, no vibration of the vocal cords, explosively delivered but very quiet. Pied Piper allows him greater latitude of emotional expression. “Well?” he says finally. “By all means, Gavin, if you persuaded Richard using nothing more than talk, you can go ahead and make the same pitch to me.”

“I asked him whether the two of you plan to have kids someday. He said—oh, this’ll be fun. You ever play the Newlywed Game, Donald?”

Jared sinks lower in his chair. “He probably said I want to adopt.”

“Bingo.”

“Just because…well. Obviously.” Men aren’t really supposed to have biological clocks—just something about the planting seasons of forage crops such as oats—but Jared still feels like he only has so much time. If he can save another kid from a life like his own, it would be enough. “I’m afraid my genetic material is probably riddled with red flags.”

“That’s valid. Newlywed Game: does Richard want kids?”

“No. Or I don’t…he might have changed his mind,” says Jared, a little less certain of this answer. “He’s always been…afraid of doing poorly, I think, when he’s around kids. But he got used to them.”

“Interesting. Do you always just…” Gavin shrugs, waves a hand. “Do what he wants?”

“That’s not at all what I just described, actually.”

“It’s the bottom line, though.”

“I say no to him whenever I want,” says Jared. “And the rest of the time I’m supportive. I’m sorry you find that so hard to believe.”

“You never did have a backbone. You belonged to me until I got bored of you.” Gavin has not changed tone or expression. “And that injured your vanity, didn’t it? So you went and found some twitchy little lunatic who was never, ever going to stop needing you. You can keep wiping the drool off his cheek for forty years. Great, congrats. But I want you to remember that you wouldn’t even have _him_ if not for me. You’d still be on the street, in your cute little off-the-rack separates, shopping that résumé around, looking for ass to eat.”

There’s a mirror along one wall, obviously hiding cameras. Jared can see himself in his peripheral vision, slumped in his plastic chair, wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt from a Hooli linen service, hollow-eyed, hair a mess. He looks a lot like Donald Dunn used to. Gavin’s making an easy mistake. “You remembered my name at first,” he says. “Just like now, you used it all the time even in direct conversation. When it wasn’t necessary. Because you thought it was funny.”

“Not funny, necessarily,” says Gavin, watching him. “It just didn’t suit you.”

“Do you remember the first time—your executive bathroom?” Jared says, and the shame of saying it aloud is blinding but he’s pressing through it anyway. “I don’t blame you if you don’t. You wouldn’t be the first powerful man to have a selective memory.”

“I remember.”

“While I was riding the elevator…up to your suite. One of the coders was with me as far as the twenty-ninth floor. He only looked at me once, then not at all. And when he got off at his floor he said, ‘bye Jared,’ just like that. I thought it was strange. I’d never been called Jared before. Who was this guy? And who did he think I was? A few weeks later, you were ignoring me. You called me Jared in front of everyone. And I thought…” Jared has closed his eyes to remember, summoning that first blurred glimpse. His memory has never been very sharp, which he has always considered a blessing. “I thought ‘that’s so strange,’ and that was it. I was curious about the mystery. About this stranger from the elevator. And I wasn’t…interested in you anymore. At all. You meant to cut me and I wasn’t cut. Richard did that for me. Do you understand?”

“All right,” Gavin says, sliding his chair back from the table and standing up. “This is too embarrassing for you, I can’t stay here. If you want to be obstructive about the paperwork, then I guess I’ll see you in court. If you want to call a lawyer, ask somebody for permission to place a longsat call. If you want to see Richard, put in a request on level nine. If you want to waste my valuable time again, good fucking luck with that.”

He leaves, closing the door behind him, and the automatic lock makes a _kerchunk_ sound as it slams to.

Alone in the blue room, Jared folds his arms on the table to make a pillow, puts his head down. Maybe Richard did have a plan; maybe Jared’s spoiled it all. Maybe a little bit of strategic submission to Gavin’s whims and hungers would have saved them. He doesn’t know.


	7. le nez de cléopâtre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé._ (Blaise Pascal)

Nobody at Hooli will admit that they’re holding Jared in custody. The beefy security guard and officious clerk say the same thing: “Of course you’re free to go at any time, Mr. Dunn.”

But he’s not, because where can he go? He has no way off the station. Ships dock and depart all the time, according to the arrivals screen in the central hub, but Jared can’t book one. He has the clothes on his back and nothing else. His phone is dead; even the chips in his bank cards were scrambled by the EMP pulse from the crash of the _Handsome Lake_. 

A few longsat calls to Earth could clear all that up, but Hooli’s stonewalling him on that too. The Lumen’s AI tells him to _ask your system administrator to remove this restriction_ , and the human staff shrug their shoulders.

“This just says you’re restricted from placing longsat calls,” they tell him, while staring helplessly at their screens. “Would you like me to escalate this issue to our troubleshooting team?”

Jared always tells them _yes_ and _thank you_ , because he remembers what it’s like to work for Hooli. It’s not their fault.

 

Jared knows this could be worse. Nobody hurts him. He’s not chained to the wall. He has the run of the place. Access to shoelaces and belt buckles. As if they don’t think he’s desperate or crazy. Meals in the nearest cafeteria with everybody else—as much food as he wants, and he’s famished after the abbey’s thin rations. Maintenance workers clean his bland, hotel-like room once a day. Donald Dunn would have thought this was a paradise.

At night, because he can’t sleep, Jared turns the Lumen screen on and searches for all the things he wondered about while they were on Perdigon. Settling pointless arguments that the kids used to get into, resolving questions they’d had that neither he nor Richard were able to answer.

Out of curiosity, he searches for the prophecies of Handsome Lake, which are bleak.

> _Now there are no doors left in the houses, for they have all been kicked off. There are no fires in the village and have not been for many days. Now the men, full of strong drink, have trodden in the fireplaces. They alone track there and there are no fires and their footprints are in all the fireplaces._
> 
> _Now the dogs yelp and cry in all the houses for they are hungry._
> 
> _So this is what happens._

Old news, the destruction of a way of life. Even so, Jared feels uneasy when he reads it, as if still under its threat.

Jared also looks up the Jewish prayer for the dead, thinking of the kids praying the Rest Eternal by the highway. The Mourner’s Kaddish isn’t quite right—that’s only for close relatives. Not for a therapist, or a pile of dead monks, or all Jared’s co-workers, or anyone else from Bonaventure. 

But he finds a translation of El Malei Rachamim, and the scratchy recorded singing of a long-dead cantor fills the bare, anonymous room.

> _God, full of mercy, who dwells in the heights, provide a sure rest upon the wings of the Shekhinah, within the range of the holy and the pure, whose shining resembles the sky, to the souls of the dead, for charity and righteous deeds have been pledged to their memory. The Master of Mercy will protect them forever, from behind the hiding of his wings, and will bind them up in the bond of life. The Everlasting is their heritage, and they shall rest peacefully upon their lying place, and let us say: Amen._

As Richard said at the time, Jared wishes it actually helped. But maybe it doesn’t matter if it helps or not—it doesn’t matter how it makes him feel. At least he’s not ignoring all those people who died on Perdigon. They deserve this moment of attention and respect.

He listens to the cantor, whose voice cracks with emotion, and when it’s over, he turns off the Lumen screen and lies awake in the dark.

 

The Lumen says it’s May 19th, and it’s been…more than two days but less than five, since Gavin came to him. That’s all that Jared can work out. Night and day blur together. He’s been wandering the corridors of the Siddhartha station’s level 9, looking for Richard. It’s a med bay, or so Jared thinks at first. Steel and glass, a noisier air filter filling the corridors with white noise, harried-looking staff in scrubs. Large sectors of the level are blocked off with movable partitions announcing renovations. _Coming Soon._

At every desk and nursing station, the staff give him the runaround. The official story is that Richard’s implant was malfunctioning—plausible, Jared has to admit. Likely. Whether it’s true is difficult to pin down. It takes eight hours to chase down a doctor who will comment. 

“Oh, the implant was damaged _well_ beyond repair,” says the doctor when Jared corners him. Nametag reads _Crawford_ , and he’s cheerful but glib. “Some of the inner components were melted, and there was damage to the surrounding tissue—”

“Are you saying brain damage?” Jared interrupts.

“That’s the tissue I’m talking about, Einstein, yes. It’s the least of his problems. I can’t believe you were trying to market this thing to the public,” says Crawford, holding up a small plastic bag with the disconnected implant inside. “Not that I’m trying to discourage you. This’ll be the greatest thing for neurosurgeons since the invention of the motorcycle.”

Jared takes the little bag from him, as if it’s a talisman that will bring Richard back. The implant is the size of Jared’s thumbnail, shaped roughly like a nautilus shell, the plastic of its outer case bubbled and distorted now. He can still make out the tiny green swish of the Pied Piper logo. “I wasn’t even _notified_ that you were doing this without—”

“Easy, wildman, I don’t make the rules. He came through it fine, anyway, after our team saved his life—you’re welcome—and he’ll be recovering for about four to six weeks. Enjoy the breast implants, we threw those in gratis.” The doctor laughs at his own joke.

“I’m afraid I’m in no mood to find that funny,” says Jared evenly. “What about the psychological effects of this? Richard…really depends on his abilities.”

“Look, sorry you didn’t get to do the extra paperwork, okay? You must’ve been looking forward to it. But my dumbass of a patient was in danger and there wasn’t time for hand-holding,” says the doctor. “Anyway, he’s probably more powerful without the implant by now.”

Jared’s not sure if that’s good news or not. “Really?”

“If you keep stimulating the brain artificially, it’ll eventually start reacting even without the stimulus. More and more severely, over time. It’s called the kindling effect. Relieving the intracranial pressure should help with the headaches,” says Crawford. “We do actually know what we’re doing, chief. I mean, I may be burned out and dead inside, but I’d be in serious trouble if I fucked up Gavin Belson’s second-favourite brain, right?”

Hooli doesn’t care if Jared lives or dies, but they definitely care about keeping Richard in good condition. Even if it’s only to extract some extra profit from him. Jared can take some solace in that. “The thing is I just want to _see_ him—”

“Ask the nurse.”

People get nervous around Jared when he’s short of sleep, and he’s not sure why. What do they think he’s going to do? Jared takes a step closer to the doctor, and Crawford backs away. “Any time I ask the nurses anything, they tell me to wait for the doctor to come by for rounds,” he says. “So I’ve been here for nine hours. Waiting.”

“Hey, I don’t have any control over—”

“And now you’re here,” Jared goes on, as if Crawford hasn’t spoken. “Tell the nurses that I’m allowed to see my husband. Please.”

In the tone of someone who doesn’t care enough to put up a fuss when challenged, Crawford replies, “Sure. Fine.” He brushes past Jared to lean over the counter of the nurses’ station. “Folks, just give this worried stick insect what he wants, okay? Let him visit.”

The nurse sighs, and taps her screen to call someone else. After a long, muffled conversation, she looks up at Jared and gives him her customer service smile. “Mr. Hendricks is in suite 9843. That’s on the Nirodha arm of the station, so you’ll have to take the moving walkway to the centre hub first. I’ll let them know you’re coming, but there’s another security screening at the Nirodha gate anyway.”

Jared has been burned before, so he wants to hear some extra confirmation. “And if I leave now and follow your directions, I can expect that when I get there, they’ll let me see him?” He’s trying to stay calm. Neutral. Not accusatory. “They won’t tell me to come back here and ask you again, will they?”

“I’ll let them know that you’re _medically_ cleared to see him,” the nurse says carefully. “The department he’s in might have other security concerns. You’ll have to ask them.”

Jared decides it’s worth a shot, and heads for the centre hub of the station.

 

In the busy central hub of Siddhartha, Jared’s studying the backlit map of the station when he hears a familiar voice.

“Jared! What are you doing here, man?” It’s Big Head, who Jared hasn’t seen since the wedding. Cradling a fountain drink the size of a baby, as usual. “I saw you guys on the news! Nobody told me they were bringing you here.”

“Big Head…” Jared impulsively pulls him in for an awkward, lopsided hug. “Please, I don’t want to get you in trouble, but if you could just get me in to see Richard—”

“Oh man, Richard’s here too? No way,” says Big Head with a grin. “I didn’t have anything important to do today—well, I hardly ever do. Sometimes they make me give, like, speeches and stuff? It’s all written for me, I just read the prompter. Where were you trying to go?”

“Suite 9843 in the Nirodha arm.”

“Weird. I used to work there. Well, not _work_ , but y’know.” Big Head leads Jared to the security checkpoint for the Nirodha arm of the station. “I thought it was all HooliNext offices down that way. That’s their precog tech project—they thought I could help them develop it just because I used to work with you guys. Wild, huh?” Big Head laughs at the idea. “Couldn’t have helped them if I wanted to.”

“Are you off that project then?” asks Jared, as Big Head waves the security guards away as if they’re over-attentive waiters. 

“I guess so!” Big Head joins him on the moving walkway that will take them down the length of Nirodha. “Did you guys ever figure out the in-ear model of the implant? I remember when we were trying it on everyone in the office.”

The small version, the size of a grain of rice, is so innocuous that they’ve tested it widely. Shruti got to try it as well, during her initial tour of the Pied Piper campus. “The old prototype works on anyone with latent ability, but it does a lot of damage too. We settled on the model with the lower side effect profile, but it still doesn’t…really work,” Jared admits. “At first, maybe 3% of our testers would feel anything. We kept at it and got our numbers up to 8%. That’s very weak—we still haven’t beaten the placebo.”

“Okay, that’s good,” says Big Head in relief. “Because Hooli sort of…they took mine. I’d completely forgotten it was still in there—for _weeks_ , so comfortable, dude. Dang did a great job designing that thing. But Hooli found it one day in a routine security scan and confiscated it. So I’m glad it doesn’t really work.”

Jared doesn’t like that news. “Why would they—were they afraid it was a listening device?”

“Yeah, they found out that it communicates with Ahriman so they decided it was enemy tech that might be snitching to competitors.” Big Head shrugs. “They’ve had it for months, but if it’s only a failed prototype then that’s no big.”

“Still, though. That’s long enough for them to be reverse-engineering something,” says Jared, checking his pocket again for Richard’s broken implant. It’s safe. He keeps his hand folded around it. “Even the less effective version could be enough to give them a clue.”

“For sure. Hooli still _wants_ precog tech,” Big Head says. “That’s why they keep me around. HooliNext was a pretty lowkey program, because like…if they fail, they’re gonna want to sweep it under the rug, you know?”

Down the Nirodha arm, the renovation barriers are patterned with blue HooliNext logos. Sheets of plastic ripple in the recirculated air, and they can hear sounds of machinery nearby. 

“This looks like they’re getting ready for something,” Jared says, looking back over his shoulder the way they came. _Do not leave the moving walkway,_ says an automated Lumen voice. _Wait for a designated stopping point._ “But I don’t see a launch date anywhere.”

Big Head is taking a long pull from his drink. “Dunno. I _think_ someone would’ve told me if Hooli had figured anything out about precog tech. Like, since I’m their…guy who talks about precog tech on the news.”

Maybe it’s not too late, then. The walkway deposits them in a white corridor, where the paint is fresh and the lighting gentle. It’s quiet here, without even the Lumen’s usual ambient sounds: no fake birds, no fake wind, only the station’s natural hum. The window is angled toward the face of the planet, an unfamiliar blue marble. Not Nephele, although this too is an ocean planet, cloud-streaked. A colder planet, its sea ice shimmering with a high albedo, pale and clean.

Big Head strides over to the nursing station. “Hey, you’ve got Richard Hendricks staying here, right? Can we see him?”

Instant compliance. Anything for Hooli’s boy genius. A single smiling nurse comes to offer them visitor passes, disposable booties to wear over their shoes, bottled water, a warmed blanket—

“What’s the wifi password for Nirodha, again?” Big Head is settling down on a white sofa with his tablet and his Big Gulp. “Jared’s going first.”

“Right this way,” says the nurse, leading Jared down a dimly-lit hall. She’s soft-voiced and dark-haired, youthfully maternal, like a kind babysitter. The kind of girl Jared used to date, back when he dated girls. “See that wall up ahead?”

It’s part of the new construction, metal-reinforced. _Warning: Unshielded Area_ it says in stencilled red letters beside the door. Jared says, “Through there?”

She nods. “I can’t follow you past the barrier. He seemed like he was in a better mood today, but just in case, the touchscreen by the door will call security if you mash it three times. It’ll work even if you can’t use the interface or the voice commands.”

None of this makes sense to Jared, exhausted and sleep-deprived. “I’m sorry?”

“The touchscreen beside the door when you get inside,” she repeats. “To call for security.”

“I understand, but I mean—why would I need that?”

The nurse makes a moue, her mouth ticking to one side. “Well, we’ve had some incidents. Just accidents,” she reassures him. “No one blames him for it. We’re all so excited to be working on this project, really, we are. And so far the shielding is really helping.”

Jared doesn’t know what to believe, but he hopes it’s true. He hopes Richard _has_ fought back against these people. Somehow. It’s hard to imagine Richard successfully hurting anyone, really, at least in physical fights unfolding in real time. Richard does vengeance well, if he can survive long enough to nurse a grudge, but in the face of direct aggression he’ll freeze. _So I have to protect him._ “May I go through?”

“I’ll be at the desk if you need me,” she says.

 

Jared knocks on the metal door, ceremoniously, but it’s too thick to hear any response from the other side. Whatever the “shielding” is, it’s heavy-duty. The panels slide back to admit Jared through a series of three air locks, which seems excessive.

_Wait for the tone,_ says the Lumen, in the last air lock.

A high-pitched, tooth-rattling beep sounds through the narrow space, making the metal walls vibrate; an unseen mechanism buzzes—probably a scanner, Jared thinks. Typical Hooli invasiveness. 

When the last panel slides open, it’s dark.

Jared likes to keep one hand on a doorframe when he passes through. To reassure himself that it’s not too late to back out again. He’s not alone. “Richard?”

He lets go of the doorframe, and the panel slides shut again behind him. Jared’s sealed in a small, black space where his own voice echoes strangely. After bad experiences with closets, basements, root cellars, crawl-spaces, wood-sheds, horse-trailers, shipping containers, abandoned malls, and collapsed parking garages, Jared doesn’t like confined spaces, but when he fumbles against the wall his hand brushes the touchscreen beside the door. Red light spills from the screen into the darkness, and finally he can see Richard.

Bathed in the red light, Richard is sitting on the floor—cross-legged, slouching, in a space that now seems infinite. Mirrors, Jared realises. A small room panelled with them, like an art exhibit. Their repeated figures recede into the distance. 

“I knew you’d come today.” Richard’s in a hospital gown that hangs loose from his bony shoulders, and the surgeons have shaved his hair haphazardly on the right, dressings taped over keyhole incisions. “Babe, sit down, you’ll get dizzy.”

“I’m sorry it took me so long, I’m so sorry…” Jared _is_ getting dizzy, actually, constantly caught in his own peripheral vision, so he lowers himself to the floor. Richard pulls him closer, so that Jared’s head is resting in his lap. They curl together on the floor. 

“You have to tell me what’s happening,” Jared tells Richard. “Are you okay—the doctor said you had brain damage—”

“That guy’s just a dick,” says Richard, stroking Jared’s hair back from his forehead. “I mean. Physically, everything feels…rough. Mentally—I don’t know,” he admits.

Jared can feel the fine vibration of the station’s stabiliser engines, thrumming through the metal and glass. “Do you know what day it is?” he asks, the _introibo_ of the mental status exam.

“May 19.”

“And where are we?”

“Gavin Belson’s toilet bowl.”

Jared smiles. “I’m so frazzled, I can barely remember the rest. I haven’t slept in days.”

“I can do it for you, it’s okay. Name me some things that are red.”

“Apples. Cherries. Pomegranates. Strawberries. Um, beets…”

“You must be hungry.”

“You picked an appetising colour. But I am,” Jared admits. He closes his eyes to the infinite reflections. “Do they keep you in here? All the time?”

“A few hours a day,” says Richard. He sounds indifferent. “I sleep someplace else.”

“Why?” says Jared. “What’s this place for? And why so small?”

“Proof of concept. Hooli wanted to try their psi-shielding materials before they committed to the design. It works pretty well, actually,” Richard says, reaching up to tap at the glass beside him. “My head’s so quiet.”

“Can you still see?” Jared asks. “I mean, does the shielding stop the visions?”

“No, that’s not what I mean by quiet. I’m seeing—way too much,” says Richard. Once that would have excited him, but now he just seems tired. “Decades ahead, the better part of a century. But I don’t feel the static. No noise, just signal.”

The conversation reminds Jared of the time when his mother’s boyfriend Rod tried to clear a wrens’ nest from the disused attic of their house. Five years old, Jared watched from the bottom of the ladder as Rod lifted the panel away from the hatch. A shower of dirt, twigs, tiny brown feathers, and speckled eggshells rained down, and then Rod stood head and shoulders in another world. Jared’s mom called worried questions up at him, _some of that could carry disease, what if it’s not just birds, are there termites, are there rats?_ Rod replied to each question in his laconic way, _naw, just birds_ , his voice echoing through the strange space. 

Jared had to take his word for it. He never got to see the attic for himself.

“The nurse said there’d been accidents,” he says to Richard, resisting the impulse to reach up and touch his face, turn his gaze back down to the living world. “You didn’t—is that true?”

“They got spooked,” Richard says with a shrug. “It’s easy to freak someone out. When they already know they’re doing something wrong. Don’t worry, I don’t have…like, everything’s the same as it was, Jared. Just—more so.”

“I’m not scared of that,” Jared whispers. He’s never found Richard’s abilities unnerving, per se. It’s just the thought of losing him. “I’m worried about everything else.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t really sign that agreement for Gavin, did you?”

Richard’s attention finally snaps back to the present. “I didn’t sign anything. A consent form for surgery, because my head was fucking exploding, but—what, did he forge my signature on something?”

“An agreement to compensate rescue workers, he said.” Jared closes his eyes in Richard’s lap. “But the document was too thick. I didn’t read it all, but—it looked too dangerous to sign. I knew you wouldn’t give in to him. I knew you never would.”

Richard doesn’t reply, and for a long time he’s so silent that Jared feels alone in this tiny room.

Finally, he says, “We can never build it.”

“What?”

“The tech. We can’t build it. As far as I can see—nobody ever does.” Richard’s gaze is fixed, his pale eyes clouded. “There just isn’t any way to stimulate the visions without—without _this_ ,” he says, gesturing at the incisions, the mirrors, the hospital gown. “There’s never going to be a consumer market for living this way. Hell, I’d pay someone to make it stop, at this point. If I could. But Gavin’s got a better idea. He’s just gonna breed more of me.”

“You mean—wait—” Jared sits up. Richard’s never been able to see so far in advance, but Jared doesn’t doubt him; it has the sick feeling of inevitability. “You mean a genetic program. Right?”

“It’s viable. A set of genes that encode…” Richard pauses, still half-distracted by something Jared can’t see. He opens and closes one hand, an inarticulate gesture. “Um, ion channels in the cells that produce a predisposition to develop psionic abilities. Along with hemiplegic migraine, certain forms of epilepsy and autism, episodic ataxia, mild GI issues, stuff like that.”

That alone is a historical discovery, apparently just plucked whole from a future timeline. Jared’s guts feel cold. “But this could be—I mean, that’s such an incredible advance, if you’re right. Gavin can’t just drag science to a dead halt and declare ownership of—they’re _your_ genes.”

“Yeah, you can’t patent human genes, but you can patent a process for modifying them. That’s where Gavin plans to cash in.” Richard’s voice is detached. “He’ll industrialise it. That way he can fill a factory floor with rooms like this one. Hundreds of precogs, caged like battery hens, watching the markets all day. A psychic sweatshop. Not even just precogs—it’s just a genetic predisposition, and it can express itself in different ways. Different psionic abilities. The military, the deep state, private contractors, they’ll all pay to have sweatshops of their own. Reproductive rights are fucked up on a lot of colonial planets, so that’s where he’ll get his warm bodies. And then…”

Jared waits for him to finish the sentence, but he doesn’t. “And then?”

Richard shakes his head, as if to dislodge something. “You don’t want to live in that world.”

“So what do we do?”

“Jared, I’m done with trying to change things.” Richard draws his knees up in front of him, self-protective, resting his head against the glass. “If I were any good at it, we wouldn’t be here. I tried—I nearly let it kill me—and this is where we end up. Trapped on a Hooli space station with, with a tacky fake Buddhist name. Okay? I’m not fit to make these decisions.”

“Richard…”

“Dinesh and his lentils, the Oregon boy in Rome, Alcuin of York, Gavin’s ship—this is my fault. I was scheming and orchestrating even when I could barely see six inches in front of my face, and look.” Richard taps the glass again, harder, banging on it with his wrist. “It's all a fucking failure like everything else I've ever tried to do. I'm not smart enough for this. _Le nez de Cléopâtre_ —you know that line from Pascal? If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed. Longer or shorter. By a millimeter. It's so easy to get everything wrong.”

“If it intimidates _you_ , all the more reason to keep this tech out of Gavin’s hands.”

“Why?” Richard says. “I’m not any better than he is. He’s not dumb, he’s just short-sighted and shallow and selfish. Me fuckin’ too. And I have the right to decide what other people should experience? That’s bullshit, of course I don’t. It’s like—like that story you tell with the sick rabbi, the beauty sinking into the earth. All these plans and arguments and ideas, they’re _nothing._ They don’t matter. Useless fucking chatter, compared to real people that suffer.”

“Fine, maybe. But at least you care.” Jared pushes himself back up from Richard’s lap, bracing his weight on one arm. “At least you _know_ that—”

“No. Knowing isn’t enough,” Richard interrupts. “Jared, if I could have saved you by letting twenty people on Bonaventure die, I would’ve done it. It didn’t come to that, but it could have. That’s not romantic, it’s fucking nepotism. It’s not romantic to those twenty people who just get _written off_ by some freak who’s—”

“I really don’t like it when you call yourself that.”

“—declared himself the arbiter of life and death.”

“Any more than if you called me a freak. I don’t like it.” Jared’s angry and he doesn’t know where to direct it. At Gavin, of course, but maybe also at Richard. “What exactly is your alternative, Richard? Of course it’s not fair that you have to make these choices. But you do. Otherwise…what? We just let it all happen? All those kids with your genes who are going to grow up as Hooli property—they’re on their own, is that it?”

“Look. All I wanted to do was build my stupid little music app, and now—”

Jared can’t accept that. “We’re talking about an entire generation of people. Being exploited, being violated—”

“So yell at Gavin, not me.”

“I’m not yelling, and I don’t mean that it’s your _fault_ , but if you can stop it—” Jared stops because he’s not even sure anymore. _Is_ Richard responsible, if he sees this and does nothing? “The man I married would stop it,” he finishes. 

“Great, thank you, that’s really helpful, _please_ tie the success of our marriage to this massive humanitarian disaster that you expect me to prevent—Christ, Jared, what the _fuck_ do you want from me?” 

At least he’s getting angry now, Jared thinks. “I want you to do the right thing with whatever power you have. I don’t—baby, I don’t expect you to do the impossible, but you have to do something. You have to try. There must be a way to get ahead of this.”

“With what?” Richard demands. “We have no company, no product, no funding, no offices, no employees. We’re lucky Monica even gives a shit about us.”

“But we still have _you_ ,” Jared says softly, reaching out now for his hand. “And you have me. Can’t you find a future where this doesn’t happen? The way you did on Perdigon?”

Richard curls up tighter in his corner. “Jared…”

“If it were our kids—if it were Shruti or Océane or Laura—”

“Stop.” 

“—forced into pregnancy, or shut up in a box like this, practically enslaved—”

“I said stop,” says Richard.

Jared stops, and waits.

Richard’s pressed against the mirrored walls of the narrow space. He doesn’t look at Jared, but after a couple of minutes he speaks again. “All I can do is buy some time. I can keep it from happening for twenty or thirty years—then it all happens anyway. Is that worth it?”

Jared doesn’t pause to consider it. “Yes. What do we do?”

“Hooli’s research team hasn’t discovered the right gene-modification process yet. But they will,” says Richard. “I know what that process is, I can _see_ it. I could file a patent on it as soon as we get out of here. Then we sit on it and do nothing. That’d fuck Gavin over for twenty years, until the patent runs out. Hooli might be out of the race by then, but somebody just as bad will grab the baton. You can’t kill an idea—best you can do is make it unprofitable.”

“I’ll take it,” says Jared. “That’s another twenty years before Hooli gets the world in a chokehold, Richard, it’s—don’t say it doesn’t matter. It matters.”

Richard laughs, a little. “You think we’re not choking already?”

 

As Monica predicted, Laurie is furious. She’s almost raised her voice, leaning over her desk with her palms planted. Gilfoyle and Dinesh are cowed and silent, like a couple of eighth-graders getting chewed out by the principal. 

“Mr. Chugtai,” says Laurie. “You are here to tell me that you acquired one of our startups, without first notifying the board, in a deal that you made over an ansible connection, for the sum of one dollar. Is that correct?”

Dinesh is wilting in his chair. “Well—it was actually for more than that. I was meant to send a ship to Perdigon, so…the cost of that. Whatever that would have been. The dollar was a symbolic transfer of title. Which—”

“—Makes no difference, for our purposes in this discussion,” Laurie snaps. “Whether the price was one dollar or whether it was for an undetermined transport cost, I put it to you that you offered Mr. Hendricks an _exceedingly_ low price for his intellectual property and his data, at a time when he was in no position to refuse.”

“He actually suggested this deal, so—” Dinesh stops when he says Monica shaking her head at him. “I mean. I…understand if Raviga felt…maybe somewhat out of the loop.”

“‘Out of the loop’ is a poor descriptor. What happened,” says Laurie, “is that you threatened our investments. You ought to have done it to my face.”

Dinesh glances Monica’s way, then decides to shut up.

“Raviga would have every right to contest this sale on the basis that the question wasn’t put to the board. Nevertheless,” says Laurie, putting her glasses back on, “we do not find Mr. Chugtai to be an inappropriate candidate for CEO, if that is the recommendation of Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Dunn. Raviga is sympathetic to the argument that Mr. Hendricks is emotionally over-involved in the product, and Ahriman is an impressive technology with the potential to synchronise very well with Pied Piper’s IP. Given that Mr. Chugtai was one of the original developers of Pied Piper’s codebase, we are amenable to working with him again. And Mr. Gilfoyle has always enjoyed Raviga’s respect.”

Monica feels her shoulders relax. “I think we can revisit the particulars of this deal once Richard and Jared are back on Earth,” she says, trying to nudge the conversation away from Dinesh’s sins. “Which we’ll need to do anyway, to settle up and get the insurance process started for the losses on Perdigon.”

“Indeed. You leave in three hours,” Laurie tells them, sitting back down behind her desk. “I’ve engaged a Juno-class vessel to take you to Siddhartha station—ugh,” she says, distracted by the awfulness of the name. “Two days away at warp. I hope your calendar is clear.”

“It is now,” says Monica, pasting on a smile. She nods slightly at Dinesh, who forces one of his own. “We’ll get this straightened out, Laurie. I really do think that when the dust settles, this is going to be a positive thing for Pied Piper—”

Laurie is impatient with people repeating the obvious. “Yes, yes. Retrieve Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Dunn, please. Be sure that they haven’t left any protected technologies aboard the station. Document any injuries or items of suspicion. Should you encounter any resistance from Hooli, you may threaten them with the full brunt of Raviga’s legal department.”

“I think there’s definitely going to be resistance, Laurie.”

Laurie adjusts her glasses but doesn’t look up from her tablet screen. “Mr. Belson is welcome to try.”


	8. the vikings of our day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monica takes Dinesh and Gilfoyle to face down Gavin, with Shruti's help. Richard finds a better way forward.

Dinesh follows Monica out of Laurie’s office, waits for the door to click shut again, making absolutely sure they’re out of earshot. “Is that all she’s offering us? Lawyers? I have lawyers of my own, Monica. Expensive lawyers. Ahriman could _Bleak House_ the fuck out of Raviga in court. But Gavin _owns_ that space station, it’s private property. All he has to do is snap his fucking fingers and his security team will shoot us in the face.”

“A man’s home is his castle,” Gilfoyle agrees blandly, from his chair in Laurie’s waiting room. Being a lowly engineer, not involved in the affairs of kings, Gilfoyle doesn’t attend these meetings unless Dinesh insists, loudly, at high pitch for an hour. “Or his lair, whatever.”

“You don’t do that in _business_ , Dinesh,” says Monica, rummaging in her purse for her cigarettes. She usually tries to avoid talking to these guys as if she’s their mean ex-girlfriend—it’s beneath her, as Laurie would say. But she’s got too many things to think about right now, and busting a dumb stereotype is low on her list of priorities. “He could shoot normal civilians, sure. He can’t do that to business rivals without starting a goddamn war.”

“Dick and Jared were business rivals too,” says Gilfoyle as they head for the elevator.

Monica punches the button. “Were.”

“They still are,” says Dinesh. “The data exists, the company exists—we’re obviously going to take Richard and Jared back. Gavin must _know_ that, he must be expecting it. Richard would’ve gloated to him about pulling that stunt with Ahriman and the ansible, you know he would.”

“Of course he would.” Monica’s got her cigarettes out, tapping one against the package impatiently as the elevator takes them down. Laurie’s building has glass elevators, taking full advantage of the view: below, the flat rooftops of Palo Alto are all planted with sagebrush and agave, blocks of desert gardens outlined by their white walls, sometimes interrupted by fields of black solar panels. “When has Richard ever had a good idea that he didn’t immediately fuck up?”

“Great, this is good, we’re agreeing,” says Dinesh. “Now if you could…explain why we’re walking right into this with nothing but legal threats to defend ourselves with?”

Monica snorts. “What do you want, an army?”

“I mean, ideally. Gavin has one.”

“Dinesh, you’re always telling me that Ahriman can stand up to the big boys,” says Monica as the elevator doors open onto the spaceport level. She lights up on the moving walkway, knowing that she has fifteen minutes to get rid of it before anyone will stop her. “If you think you need a private army then hire one, okay? But I don’t. All we’re doing is walking in to collect our people. Gavin’s not going to shoot us in the face because it commits him to a course of action that he doesn’t want to take, and it tanks his reputation.”

Gilfoyle is watching her in his sidelong way, with no change of expression. “He doesn’t have to shoot us in the face, as my excitable colleague says. He can still just lock his doors. Why would he let us dock at his station at all?”

“The same reason he usually lets strangers in to ogle the place,” says Monica, her free hand thrust in her jacket pocket as the chill sets in. The spaceport is vast and echoing, smelling of wet concrete and rubber. “He wants to look like Francis of Assisi in front of a camera. So we’ll bring cameras—I’ll hire a crew to follow us to Siddhartha.”

“A camera crew?” Dinesh repeats.

“Yeah. We tell them we’re making a documentary about…about the rescue,” says Monica, getting her phone out to skim through her contacts as she smokes. “We say it’s part of the planned relaunch for Pied Piper under Ahriman’s aegis. Telling the company’s story, incorporating it into the brand, all that marketing junk. It’s not even a lie, because that’s exactly what you _should_ do with any useful footage we get.”

“I don’t think it’s legal to use snuff films as part of a marketing campaign,” says Gilfoyle.

Dinesh is warming to the idea, though. “That actually…that _would_ be a sweet thing to have in our back pocket as we’re rebuilding. We could really leverage the disaster if we tug on the heartstrings, play up the underdog stuff. Can we get the girl from Bonaventure, the coder?”

Monica shrugs as she scrolls through her contact list. “I think you’d be promising her a job if she did that for you. A good one.”

“I was planning to,” said Dinesh, taking umbrage at the implication. “If Richard and Jared were thinking of hiring her anyway, we can find something for her. Shruti’s young, we can sponsor her education, do the mentor thing.”

Monica looks up at him, trying to gauge his sincerity. It’s surprisingly high. “Really?”

“Yeah. I always wanted to be someone’s mentor.”

“It would be a crime if you didn’t,” says Gilfoyle. “You have so much to offer.”

Monica intervenes before they can get into an actual slapfight. “Then get her info and call her.” She takes another drag, exhaling sharply as she hits her assistant’s number on her phone. “It’s a good angle, if she’s down for it. —Hi, Emily, change of plans for today. I’m on my way to Siddhartha Station, can you make arrangements to send a camera crew with us? Like documentary stuff, yeah. Small is fine...”

“Is Shruti even a good coder?” Gilfoyle asks Dinesh.

“Probably good enough,” Dinesh says, leaning back against the handrail of the walkway, his own phone in his hand. “There’s no way she could be worse than, like, Big Head.”

“The bar is low, I see.”

Dinesh doesn’t argue, for once. “It is, yeah. AI still creeps people out—not _you_ , but people. Taking care of Pied Piper shows that we’re about human compassion and connectivity, not just machines. It’s the right thing to do, and coincidentally, it’s really useful.”

Gilfoyle raises an eyebrow. “Or the other way around?”

“Oh my God, you’re so funny,” Dinesh says in leaden tones. “Speaking of Big Head, where does he even work in Hoolispace? Not the Earth HQ, right? If he’s on Siddhartha, maybe he can help get us inside.”

“It’d solve a lot of security issues,” Gilfoyle admits, unfolding his tablet to check up on Big Head’s illustrious career. “If he has any kind of system access, I can use Ahriman to throttle them.”

“Even better.”

“Of course, that could implicate Big Head. If Gavin gets upset and decides he wants somebody’s disproportionately large head on a platter.”

Dinesh rolls his eyes. “Granted, but if we get in there and try this and fail at it, Big Head’s going down anyway. He used to work with us. Gavin would accuse him of being a Pied Piper collaborator whether it’s true or not.”

“You’re right, that _is_ an enormous flaw in your plan.”

“You haven’t pointed out a flaw.” Dinesh has to lean in to whisper-yell at Gilfoyle, since Monica’s on her phone. They keep swearing off each other, but inevitably the distances begin to close as time goes by. “You didn’t even specify what you _think_ will go wrong. You just made a dark prediction, and hoped we’d all think that cynicism is the same thing as intelligence. Well, it’s not. If you think there’s a problem, fucking spell it out. _How_ would we fail? _What_ would go wrong?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” says Gilfoyle. It’s as close as he’ll come to saying he likes the plan, because he doesn’t; it’s also as close as he’ll come to saying he hasn’t got a better idea. 

 

At the hangar, Dinesh finds a quietish side corridor to talk to Shruti. Storage rooms, equipment lockers, weird pools of condensation wetting the concrete, wisps of M-fuel fumes in the air. “Hi, is this Shruti? It’s Dinesh Chugtai. CEO of Ahriman Technologies—”

“I know who you are,” she says. Video chat is off, and he can only hear her surroundings: she’s sitting on something that creaks, maybe a staircase or an old guestroom bed, and there are voices nearby, like a family gathering that she’s trying to escape. _Except she doesn’t have a family anymore, moron._ Distant relatives and well-wishers, at best. “Is this about Pied Piper?”

“Yeah—yeah, definitely,” says Dinesh, gingerly lowering himself down to rest on his haunches, trying not to sit in or lean against any of the mysterious wet spots. “We’re having some trouble with—um, Richard and Jared have been incommunicado since Gavin rescued them. ‘Rescued’ in inverted commas, maybe, ha.” Instinctively trying to make a joke even though this situation isn’t funny, not even to him. “Pied Piper’s VC firm wants them back, and legal wants to get the sale of the company data finalised. So we’re going to head for Hoolispace to pick them up.”

“Is Hooli just gonna let you do that?”

“Probably…nooot,” says Dinesh, drawing the syllable out while he tries to think of a better plan than the one they have. It’s not working. “Richard’s not exactly reliable, but Jared would’ve called us right away if he was allowed to place a longsat call. He just would. The fact that he hasn’t suggests that Hooli’s in a hostile mood. The radio silence worries me.”

“Huh.” Shruti sounds worried too. “What’re you guys planning to do?”

“Monica Hall, our investor from Raviga—she’s gonna get a camera crew to follow us, as if we’re making a documentary. Gavin can get away with a lot on his own turf, but he’ll try to behave if he’s on camera, she thinks. We thought it might really help to have you there as a—”

“As a prop, yeah.”

“I did not say prop. You didn’t let me finish.”

“Fine, so finish. You want me there as a what?”

Dinesh is now throwing darts with his eyes closed. “As—as a _symbol_ of Pied Piper’s past. And future. As well as…I mean, we’re very interested in, um, investing in your career. Your education. Ahriman would pick up the tab for university, free ride if you want it.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh—assuming you still want to be a coder, absolutely. We’d have a harder time justifying it if you want to leave the tech world forever and study Russian literature or something. You don’t, right?”

“I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it, but if I’m going to be a symbol of the past and future…”

“Oh no.”

“I’m just saying I might need a few years to find myself in college,” Shruti says. “Ivy League, right?”

“You know, some of the best places for STEM aren’t traditional ivies—”

“I’m just really feeling the aesthetic, you know? Quads, cricket fields, sweaters, oak panelling, club ties, racism—”

Dinesh caves. “Okay, fine, study wherever you want. Oxford, the Sorbonne, Wittenberg, who cares, it’s on the house.” He can afford it, as long as he gets Richard’s data. “Just help us get Jared and Richard back, before Gavin breaks them psychologically and they end up with Hooli Stockholm Syndrome.”

“I’m taking the piss, man, it’s okay. You could’ve just asked me to help them, you know,” says Shruti, more quietly. “Richard and Jared put their asses on the line to get us off Perdigon. I’ll return the favour—bribes appreciated but not necessary.”

“It’s not a bribe. Just…your whole world was demolished, just when you were getting ready to leave it,” says Dinesh. He knows what it’s like, building model rockets in his backyard as a kid, launching them at the moon on summer evenings, wishing he could make something big enough for escape velocity. Afraid he might never do it, afraid the little rockets would go further than he ever would. “It wasn’t your fault. You deserve a clean shot.”

“Everyone does, I guess. Thanks.” Shruti sniffs sharply, once, and says, “I’m in Toronto right now with my _chaachi_ and her kids, but I can take the train out to the spaceport in Hamilton tonight. Is that too soon?”

“It’s perfect.” Dinesh feels about four different muscles loosen up in his neck. “I like your hustle.”

 

Alone in his anonymous room on Siddhartha, held hostage, Jared’s watching the ships docking around the station’s pylons. He’s been sitting by the viewport for a couple of hours, lost in thought and entranced by the blinking lights on the ships as they come and go. Starboard is green and port is red. 

He remembers the first real conversation he ever had with Richard. After that elevator encounter, Jared saw him one evening at a self-serve bar near the Hooli campus. The place was really just a glorified vending machine, a narrow shopfront tucked between a dry-cleaner’s and a convenience store, bathed in apple-green light from the neon sign out front.

Jared had been on his way to Lot D in the rain—banished from Gavin’s sight. Waiting at a crosswalk, he happened to look up and see the coder from the elevator sitting at the little bar’s front counter by the window, like one of the figures in Hopper’s _Nighthawks_. That profile. The coder made eye contact with Jared once, then looked abruptly away as if he hadn’t meant to get caught staring.

Curious, Jared crossed the street and let himself into the bar, which was empty and humid, a cheap fan struggling to disperse the warm air. The coder gave him a tiny smile. “Hi Jared.”

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” said Jared, apologetic, as he sat down at the counter. The touchpad menu’s glass was spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, repaired with a few pieces of clear packing tape—he could still feel the paths of the cracks under his fingertip as he ordered a bottle of water. The mechanism behind the back wall made a series of _kachunk_ noises, then dispensed the bottle on a frayed old conveyor belt that ran along the bar. “You’ll have to forgive me if we’ve met before—unfortunately, years of trauma have given me a memory like Swiss cheese—”

“Um, we haven’t. Met yet. Sorry,” said the coder, who was carefully peeling the label off his bottle of Sapporo in a long strip. “Or we’re meeting now, I guess. It was fifty-fifty between this place and the Hooli cafeteria. This is quieter, it’s better. I’m Richard Hendricks and you’re Jared Dunn.”

“Pleasure to meet you—Richard, have you been following me?” Jared asked, keeping his tone as neutral as he could, although he checked over his shoulder to make sure the route to the exit was still clear. 

“No—I mean, not the way you’re probably thinking. I guess you could think of it as—no, it’s not following or stalking or anything, I just know things,” said Richard. They both looked sallow in the green light, but the backs of his ears were red. “Sorry.”

“What do you mean, you know things?”

“Have you done any reading on Serfaty’s area 39v?”

“I’m sorry?”

“In the brain,” Richard said, gesturing vaguely towards his right ear. “It’s a newer classification system, based on Serfaty’s work in the 70s—he identified this part of the entorhinal cortex, in the medial temporal lobe. The ventral part of area 39 is normally associated with memory, perception of time, navigation. Discerning the familiar from the unfamiliar. Serfaty also found that it was strongly implicated in cases of—well, alleged psychic ability, I guess.”

Jared wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “I…no, I haven’t done any reading about that. I’m sorry if I’m not understanding you properly—are you saying you’re _psychic_?”

“Sort of. Yes. I don’t like that word.” Richard wiped his clammy hands on a bar napkin that was already half-shredded. “This isn’t like… _fear death by water_ or something. It’s science, I mean, I’m not just bullshitting you. We can already stimulate area 39v in rats—at the right frequency, they’re able to navigate unfamiliar mazes without errors. More complicated in humans, the process works with some people and not with others. There might be unique cells that fire in correlation with—I’m getting into the weeds here, I’m sorry.”

“No, not at all,” Jared said reflexively, not because he understood yet but because he wanted to keep listening. Even if it was nonsense. He liked the racing rhythms of Richard’s voice, dropping sentences in the middle, switching tracks, doubling back and jumping forward. “This is new material to me, that’s all. What kind of stimulation are you talking about?”

“Deep brain stimulation with targeted electrical impulses, administered by an implant. It’d be like a pacemaker in your head, almost. Or that’s an idea I’m looking at, anyway.” Richard made a gesture like a spasm with one hand, as if demonstrating an electric shock, then went back to fidgeting with the Sapporo bottle. “When I was a kid, the doctors suggested that something like that might help, uh, regulate my brain, sort of. They thought it’d stop me seeing things. Knowing things.”

“Did it work? Did they try it?”

“Yeah. Broad-spectrum ECT, which was back in vogue when I was young. It’s an old treatment that goes in and out of fashion, because when it works the results can be dramatic, but when it fucks up it fucks up bad. For me, it made everything…louder, I guess?” said Richard, rubbing his thumb over the beads of condensation on the glass, tracing curves and lines. “Louder. Yeah. Anyway. I recognised you in the elevator.”

“From the future?”

“Right.”

“What did you see?” Jared asked, then tried to take it back. “That’s probably a question I shouldn’t ask…”

“It’s okay,” said Richard, with another private little smile directed down at the top of the bar. “Just watch. Next car is red.”

In the rainy street outside the bar’s front window, a red car passed by, cutting a grey wake as it sheared through a puddle.

Before Jared could say anything, Richard said, “Next one’s blue. Then two black, then one white, then blue again.”

Blue. Black. Black. White. Blue.

Up until then, Jared had been listening to Richard with a certain amount of benign condescension—trying to be open-minded, trying to listen kindly to someone who was probably sick. Empathising, validating, but reserving judgement. By the time the last blue car passed, though, he was shaken. “How—you could be using accomplices…”

“I couldn’t, I don’t have that many friends,” Richard admitted. “Four, max. Traffic’s easy to predict, anyhow. Even pretty simple AIs can do it already. What I’m interested in is predicting more complicated social patterns—I’ve got this really fascinating coding project that I’ve been working on since college, it’s a music app that predicts the Billboard charts.”

“That’s what you’re using this for?” Jared said, unable to disguise the incredulity in his voice. “Really?”

Richard shrugged. “Proof of concept.”

“Of course. Sorry, I’m just…” This could be something that would get Jared back into Gavin’s good graces. Not that he wanted to go back to that executive bathroom, but getting out of Lot D would be nice. Jared has always been eager to please, even when he should have been keeping his head down. “Can I see it?”

“Yeah.” Richard got his phone out to send him the prototype. He didn’t ask for Jared’s address, just thumbed it in from memory.

 

Months later, Jared asked him why he’d waited for that moment. Why hadn’t he said anything in the elevator? Or before that, even?

Richard shrugged. “Wrong time.”

“But I would’ve been just as happy to talk to you then.”

“Uh, no. You wouldn’t. Elevator had to happen first.”

“Why?”

“That’s just the way it is,” Richard said wearily. “People don’t care about things unless…it has to seem like their idea. People need context, preparation, insight—lots of stuff. Without that, a prediction doesn’t mean anything.”

“Really?” said Jared. “I’m not disagreeing, necessarily, sorry. I just didn’t know that you were…aware of that. Most of the time you seem to drop your bombshells and walk away.”

“Okay, well, I’m aware. I’m just not good at it. But most people aren’t—look at all those scientists who tried to warn everyone about climate change. They were _right_ , but the people they were trying to reach weren’t ready to think in those terms. They couldn’t imagine a different world, and so to them, the predictions just sounded crazy.”

“Was it really a failure of imagination that made them ignore the warnings, though?” said Jared. “Wasn’t it greed, in the end?”

“Greed was in the mix, sure, but they didn’t understand _how_ to be greedy in a different kind of economy, because they couldn’t imagine how it would work. If people aren’t ready to hear, they won’t. They need to be shown, they need to be _taught._ Predictions without context don’t change anything, just like—like a punchline doesn’t get a laugh without the setup. There’s a structure to this stuff. And being too early is the same thing as being wrong.”

Defeatist, maybe. But in the elevator, Richard couldn’t have said _You throw it all away to come work with me, I’m the man you marry._ Even though it was correct, it would have felt invasive and creepy. Saying it out loud would have prevented the very future it was describing. Instead, Richard had held back, and Jared had been the one to make the decision to sit down with him in the green bar. Wanting to understand. Ready for that future to unfold.

 

Jared falls asleep with his cheek mashed against the cold glass of the viewport, and it’s almost midnight on the station when he wakes to the sound of the door chime. Stumbling to the door to check the screen by the security panel, it takes him a blurry second to recognise Dinesh.

Jared barely waits for the doors to slide open before he throws his arms around Dinesh, who’s looking rumpled, as if he dressed in the dark in a hurry. It takes a second to register the camera crew in the hall behind Dinesh—they’re filming on equipment barely bigger than their phones, but the lights are still big and cumbersome. “Dinesh—what _is_ all this, how did you find us?”

“Come on, you think there’s anything Ahriman can’t find?” says Dinesh jovially, gripping Jared by the forearms, but then draws him down to whisper in his ear. “This was Monica’s idea to get us inside, and so far it’s working, so play along.” At regular volume for the cameras, he adds, “We’re just shooting some material for the big Pied Piper re-launch before we head back to Ahriman’s Earth campus.”

“It’s time you boys came home,” Gilfoyle intones, with such aggressive emptiness that it has to be a scripted line. He’s lurking between the two camera techs like a lost stage hand, arms folded. “Perdigon was a shitty idea anyway. A fetid swamp full of bottom-dwelling garbage fish and Catholics. You guys’ll have to cut that, huh?”

“Yup,” says Dinesh, not breaking eye contact with Jared. “Can we please just do this competently, without acting like we’re above it? Everyone has to do marketing, Gilfoyle.”

“All right. From now on, I’ll just spontaneously and naturally say what you told me to say.”

“Well, I’m really touched that you guys wanted to capture this moment on video,” Jared says, intervening before they can waste too much of the crew’s time. He claps his hands with forced cheer. If there’s one thing Donald Dunn is good at, it’s forced cheer. “It’s been so long since we saw you—come on over here, Gilfoyle, you can’t refuse me a hug tonight! Although of course you can, I don’t want to hug you without consent.”

“I do _not_ consent,” says Gilfoyle.

“If you’re not going to help then stay off-camera. Let’s go find Richard and then we’re on our way,” says Dinesh, shouldering past the lighting guy to proceed down the hall. “Oh, hey Monica, look who we found—”

Monica’s waiting at the corner of the hallway with Shruti slouching against the wall beside her. “I wanted to be right there when you opened the door, but Dinesh didn’t want to crowd the frame,” Monica said with a crooked smile, giving Jared a quick hug. “We found Shruti for you, we thought you guys deserved a better send-off.”

Jared’s eyes prickle as he embraces Shruti again, her skinny arms looped low around his waist. “God, I didn’t know when we’d see you again—”

“Don’t give me abandonment issues, dude,” Shruti mumbles against his shirt, then stands back and pastes on a brisk smile. “Enough with the reunions, let’s go…”

“Where _are_ we going?” Monica asks Jared. “You know where Richard’s room is, right?”

“Big Head showed me a few days ago,” says Jared, leading his friends and the disaffected camera crew in the right direction. “They’ve got him…I’m not sure filming this part of the station is going to be a good idea—”

“If we’re not allowed there,” says the camera tech with the Moses beard, “you can’t pay us enough to go.”

“I think you’ll find we can,” Dinesh says. “Let’s remember our throughlines here, okay? Stay in the moment.”

“We’re not gonna go out of our way to piss off Hooli, okay?” says the bearded tech’s partner, a scruffy guy who’s almost as tall as Jared, built like Joey Ramone. “We don’t want to get blackballed from distribution on the Lumen.”

“First of all, the Lumen’s gonna be toast in two years when Ahriman rolls over Hooli. Second, there’s a ten-thousand-dollar gratuity in it for each of you if you stick with us all the way back to the ship.”

Monica flips to the writeboard screen on her phone and scrawls OVERSPENDING on it, flashing the screen in Dinesh’s direction.

“…And not a penny more,” Dinesh tells the crew.

“Deal,” says Moses.

Joey Ramone sighs. “You’re the boss.”

 

Big Head finds them in the central concourse, and as they ride the walkway to HooliNext, Moses takes some establishing shots of the station and Monica goes through the motions of an oral history interview. 

MONICA: How are you doing, are you excited to see Richard again?

DINESH: Totally. Yeah. Very excited.

MONICA: How long has it been?

DINESH: Well, we haven’t really been—like, I wouldn’t say estranged. It was very much an amicable breakup, Pied Piper and Ahriman. We still went to Jared and Richard’s wedding. Beautiful ceremony.

GILFOYLE: Beautiful? Really?

DINESH: I mean, you could definitely tell which parts of it were things that Richard chose. But everything else was really nice.

MONICA: What was the original impetus for splitting into two companies?

GILFOYLE: Dick wanted to build something that didn’t work, and we wanted to develop Ahriman, which did work.

MONICA: I’m gonna ask that question again, and we’ll hear Jared’s answer this time. What was the original impetus for splitting into two companies?

JARED: Pied Piper was facing some challenges as we developed the implant model, but Ahriman—a machine learning system that Bertram Gilfoyle created—was in an incredibly strong position to dominate the market. Ahriman may be named after a Zoroastrian force of cosmic evil, in keeping with Gilfoyle’s spiritual values, but the system’s so aggressive and robust that I always thought of it as a mighty minotaur just waiting to be unleashed upon the hapless Athenian youths and maids. So far it’s dispatched them all handily, with nary a sign of a Theseus on the horizon. In a situation like that, it only made sense to let Ahriman forge on ahead while we at Pied Piper focused on perfecting our product.

MONICA: Thank you. Jesus, Gilfoyle, was that so hard?

 

Thus rebuffed, Gilfoyle turns to Big Head, who’s playing a game on his tablet like a bored kid on a field trip. “I want your system password.”

“You can have it, but I don’t really have any kind of interesting system privileges,” Big Head says with a shrug. “I had full system access at first, but I didn’t use any of the advanced features. After the first six months they said ‘use it or lose it’ and cut me down to Hooli Express level.”

“Hooli _Express_? That’s cold.”

“Kinda, but really, all I do is use chat and the multiplayer servers. Sometimes I stream, but people just dunk on me all the time and I don’t really like the interface—”

“Why don’t you let me have that password anyway,” Gilfoyle interrupted.

 

When they get off the moving walkway at the Nirodha arm of the station, they’re accosted by a security guard, a trim and intense man with a shaved head and penetrating green eyes. His name tag reads Hoover, and he’s important enough that he’s wearing a suit rather than the usual Hooli polo-and-lanyard uniform. 

“What’s up, gang—shooting the next big indie flick, huh?” says Hoover with a smile. “Unfortunately, HooliNext is a restricted area, although I do understand the impulse to immortalise it for the historical record. Mind if I check your ID real quick?”

“We logged in at the Samudaya gate,” says Monica, showing him the code on her tablet. It’s spoofed, Gilfoyle’s handiwork, but it turns up a convincing result when Hoover scans it. “Everything’s kosher. We’re exclusively using Hooli tech to film, even.”

Hoover frowns at the screen, then glances at Shruti and nods. “Sounds good. Sorry to bother you, folks, enjoy the rest of your day. Ms. Agnihotri, Mr. Dunn—I hope your time at Hooli has been pleasant.”

“As pleasant as it always is, thank you,” says Jared.

Shruti gives him a tight smile, brows lifted. “The pleasantest.”

Hoover leaves them, and Jared hurries to the nurses’ station with Monica and the others in tow. The white corridors are as quiet as they were last time, and through the viewport, the cold planet with its pale sea ice is in darkness, a few points of light scattered across its face. Mining settlements, maybe. The staff defer to Big Head, as usual.

Shruti’s clearly weirded out. “I feel like they’re going to wheel Richard out on an upright gurney wearing a straitjacket and a muzzle.”

“It’s not quite that bad,” Jared says, reaching down to take Shruti’s hand. To reassure himself, just as much as her. “We’ll go in together, maybe keep the lighting…subdued, and we won’t crowd him. Can we find a wheelchair, actually?”

“On it,” says Monica, breaking to go sweet-talk the nurses.

“Richard can still walk, though, right?” Shruti says as she follows Jared to the dimly-lit hall that’s marked WARNING: UNSHIELDED AREA. “They didn’t…did they do something to him?”

“He was already in rough shape when we left Perdigon, and the implant had to be removed,” Jared says. “So the wheelchair’s just a precaution. He gets tired pretty quickly.”

“This is such a clusterfuck,” Shruti whispers to herself as the scanner makes its unsettling noises in the walls, beeps and bangs and deep flanging thuds.

The last panel slides back to reveal the small, red-lit chamber where Richard’s waiting. He doesn’t look any worse than usual, Jared thinks, but Shruti’s not ready for it and draws her breath in sharply.

“I can’t believe they roped you into this, I’m sorry,” Richard says to Shruti, although he’s clearly not surprised to see her.

“That’s such a gracious welcome.” Shruti reaches for his arm. “Come on, man, they didn’t rope me into anything. You tried to get me home, I can try to get you home. Are you okay? You don’t look okay.”

“I’m fine if Jared gets me on my feet,” says Richard, struggling to get upright with their help. “This was Monica’s idea, right?”

“It was.”

“Has Hoover spotted us already or does that not happen yet?”

“That…already happened,” Jared says.

Shruti helps Richard over the threshold and into the hall. “Are we already fucked, then?”

“Not…necessarily,” Richard says, taking a long breath and steadying himself between Shruti and Jared. “Hoover buys the documentary story and gets excited to tell Gavin about it, so that the boss can show up to look pretty on camera. Gavin’s gonna intercept us, so just—don’t give him a reaction.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Gavin, can we have a _minute_ without this performative PR shit?” Shruti muttered. “Is there time to get back to the ship before he—”

But there is no time. Gavin steps into view at the end of the hallway, flanked by Moses and Joey Ramone, who are filming his best angles. “Richard, here at Hooli we really do frown on spoilers. Banworthy offence.”

From behind him, Monica says in her iciest tones, “Gavin, we’re on our way back to Earth. What’s your endgame here, do you want to detain us? Because that would be an unacceptable way to treat your competitors, as well as being really childish.”

“Ouch,” says Gavin. “Sorry, I didn’t realise you _were_ competitors—you’re one of Laurie Bream’s ladies-in-waiting at Raviga, aren’t you? Haven’t seen you in awhile, I like what you’ve done with your hair.”

Monica resists the temptation to tell Gavin exactly what she thinks of his Michael-Douglas-in- _Wall-Street_ hair, and instead gives him a dead-eyed gaze that Laurie helped her perfect. “Thank you. We’ll be going, then.”

“Mm, not so fast, hang on,” says Gavin. “Hoover told me you logged in at Samudaya, but that can’t be true. Can it? I called the desk there to ask who was shooting on the station tonight—they didn’t know. You didn’t book ahead or talk to our outreach team. Why would you lie about that?”

“Suspicious, sir,” says Hoover from behind Gavin, while Moses and Joey Ramone do their best to keep him out of frame.

“Shut up, Hoover.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“So that means you’re trespassing on my property—why, I couldn’t say,” Gavin says. “I have been nothing but hospitable. My medical team even saved Richard’s life, again, when the implant failed. No charge, even. I don’t know how else to prove my good intentions. But Hoolispace is sovereign territory, we’re doing a lot of major innovation here, and I will defend our right to control access.”

“If that’s what this is about, then you can have your goons escort us to our ship and we’ll go,” Richard says, leaning on Jared and Shruti. There’s a fine tremor in his limbs, but anger’s keeping him going. “Problem solved. Except that’s not what you really want, is it? What you _want_ is to make us bend the knee. Even the surgery—Christ, I almost wish I believed you that you did that out of basic human decency. But we both know you really just wanted to dig around in my skull and get a few good tissue samples.”

“Without having to ask for consent,” Monica fills in. “You illegally intercepted private communications about the sale of Pied Piper’s data, and then you tried to pressure Richard and Jared into signing salvage agreements that would tank them while Hooli profits.”

“Absolutely false. Hendricks signed an employment agreement of his own free will—”

“Bullshit, you forged my signature just to screw around with Jared’s head—”

Dinesh is wearing a serious-businessman expression, but can’t keep the corners of his mouth from turning upward. “Sounds like Hooli’s dealing with some very serious fraud allegations.”

“Oh sure, figures you’d be here,” Gavin snaps. “They’re not ‘allegations’, they’re time-wasting _fiction_ from a company of sore losers that can’t compete. They’ll fit right in at Ahriman. A bunch of entitled babies who think that rules don’t apply to them, who think they can come and threaten me on my own property—you’re lucky I haven’t had my security teams treat you like a fruit fly infestation. Any American court would uphold my right to defend what’s mine—”

Richard interrupts. “Gavin, for fuck’s sake, you’re on camera.”

“So? Record whatever you want. You think I’d ever let your data off this station? I’ll have all your equipment wiped before you’re allowed to undock.”

“You’re too late. We’ve been streaming it live to Big Head’s Lumen channel,” says Gilfoyle.

“I didn’t know anything about this,” Big Head tells Gavin, plausibly.

“See, Big Head’s already got some hundred-K followers who tune in to watch him run into the wall when he plays _Helios: Uprising_. Which is handy,” says Gilfoyle. “They say you really need a large social network to go viral—I haven’t got one, personally. No social media, because unlike the ovine masses, I understand how privacy works. _But_ my Satanic temple group has twenty-five thousand subscribers, and sadly, it seems that there are some sheep among the goats. I posted the link twenty minutes ago and they’ve been sharing it everywhere.” 

“I’ve got some followers too,” Dinesh adds with a bit of rare false modesty. “They went for that link like sharks on a bucket of chum. As soon as Gavin Belson made an appearance on the channel, acting unhinged and threatening violence—”

“Hey, no, I did _not_ …specify my preferred method for dealing with fruit flies,” says Gavin, keeping his eye on the camera lens now. “Nor did I intentionally compare other tech innovators with vermin. I would hope that Hooli’s record of community excellence will prove that I do not support violence against…our friendly rivals at Ahriman or Raviga. Absolutely not.”

“Look at that,” says Gilfoyle, looking down at his phone. “Your stock just dropped. Guess your acting skills need work.”

“Let me see—” Dinesh elbows closer to look over Gilfoyle’s shoulder. “Eighteen percent drop, are you kidding me? I almost feel bad now—”

“‘Facing accusations of fraud, Hooli CEO lashes out in bizarre rant on streaming channel.’ And they used a screenshot of you with your mouth open,” Gilfoyle tells Gavin, showing him the screen. “It’s very unflattering.”

“Please, the market’s twitchier than Hendricks these days,” Gavin says. “This is nothing. Video streams are ephemeral. I can visit a pit bull rehabilitation centre tomorrow and recoup the loss in twenty minutes.”

“Well—while that may be true, you _are_ still on camera,” Jared points out. “They heard you say it.”

Gavin snaps his fingers at Hoover, who murmurs an instruction into his communicator. “Kill the signal.” Phone and tablet screens go dark, the already dim hallway switching to emergency power.

“Now that we have some privacy,” says Gavin, “you should think very carefully about whether you want to re-launch Pied Piper under circumstances like these. HooliNext is poised to start genetically engineering precogs within five years. Pied Piper has nothing but an implant protoype that poses serious danger to consumers.”

“Yeah, and Pied Piper also has Ahriman,” Richard says. “You think the combination of a precog and the world’s most powerful AI might be a little dangerous for you? You like those odds? I’ll bet you an even million that we’ll beat you to the patent office.”

Monica can’t flash her phone at Richard, but she mouths _OVERSPENDING_ at him anyway.

Gavin snorts. “You think you can pivot to running a genetic program that easily? You know everything there is to know about the biotech industry? I mean, historically, you guys at Pied Piper haven’t been quick learners. You could threaten to become a cupcake company and it’d still take you three years to figure out how to do it. Hooli’s genetic program is ready to go, meanwhile Pied Piper doesn’t even have office space—” 

“Yeah. Well. Maybe not. But you have beef with Poriyot Labs, I remember you told me that,” says Richard, who’s improvising now; there’s no time to look ahead to make sure that these plans will pan out. “When you were telling me about your legacy. The kids you’re scared to have. But Poriyot _is_ a very successful and experienced biotech company, and I’m gonna take a wild guess and figure that grudge goes both ways. Maybe they’d be interested in partnering with us, if it meant they could put their thumb in your eye one more time.”

“Poriyot. Typical,” says Gavin, shaking his head. “So now you’re just volunteering to breed precogs for me? If you _want_ to supply Hooli with a steady source of psionic labour in the future, then it seems like the system’s working as intended.”

“No. That’s not the plan.” Richard has been hamster-wheeling through this problem ever since he discussed it with Jared, and by now he thinks he has the only usable answer. The only one he’s likely to come up with, anyway. “I can’t stop you from doing research, and I can’t even stop you from setting up shop on some libertarian hellplanet like Anacreon, where you’ll be free to exploit anyone with a uterus to make them breed telepaths. I could patent the gene engineering process to slow you down—and I plan to. But there’s one thing you can’t do, no matter how much money you have, Gavin. You can’t _teach_ these telepaths. You can’t train them. You have no idea what goes into learning to master an ability like this. But I do.”

Gavin’s mouth flattens into a thin line. “You think so?”

“I can do it better than you could.” That’s all that Richard’s sure of, but maybe it’s enough. “I’m done with trying to strike it rich, I don’t fucking care anymore. All I want is to make some real contributions to actual _science_ —remember science?—and do the right thing by the next generation. You might have the numbers, but we can train the best in the business. And we’ll teach them how to—how to resist. How to organise.” 

Richard’s thinking of the abbey on Perdigon, about the afternoons he used to spend telling the kids about amphibian biology and solar wind, arguing about _Margot labourez les vignes._ Not so different from the earliest medieval universities that grew out of the same monastic tradition. Students and teachers gathered from all over the countryside, a community trying to preserve its few precious texts against the forces of entropy, walled off from the outside world but open to the sky.

“Richard’s right,” Jared says, perhaps not just out of loyalty. “By the time that patent expires in twenty years, Hooli will have to deal with an educated workforce that’s well aware of its own value. Training institutions can be a powerful source of solidarity over the long term.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” Richard can feel a drop of sweat working its way down his spine. “And _if_ they want to work for you, you won’t be in any position to dictate the terms. Those kids won’t be tools to advance your agenda.”

Gavin raises his eyebrows as if waiting for them to keep going, then shrugs and says, “That’s it? So you’re just retreating in defeat. You really are bending the knee. You can’t beat me, so you’re telling yourself that running a telepathic trade school is exactly what you wanted to do all along.”

“No, I’m _going_ to do what I always wanted to do. Like I told you, Gavin, I want to make it normal,” says Richard, gripping Jared’s arm hard. “I want to give these kids a chance at normal. I can’t control what happens, there are events that can’t be changed. Disasters that nobody can stop. But you can still change people’s minds. And that’s the real way you change the future.”

Gavin doesn’t look convinced, but he looks at the others too, trying to gauge the right level of scepticism. Monica and Gilfoyle are expressionless, giving nothing away; Dinesh seems to be recalibrating his plans; Shruti’s chin is lifted, defiant. Gavin’s gaze lingers on Jared for a few moments, as if trying to squeeze out one more moment of intimidation, but he turns on his heel to leave. “Hoover, get these lights back on.” 

Hoover hurries out of his way, calling ahead to warn the next sector of the station that their king is approaching.

“We can go now, right?” says Big Head. “I’m probably fired.”

“I think we’d better,” Jared says.

 

The Juno-class ship is small but plush within, plenty of legroom, cushy seats that convert to mediocre beds. Too cold, of course, but an attendant brings Jared some folded blankets to ward off the usual chills and draughts of space travel.

Richard’s trying to eat a plastic tray of cheap California roll sushi, one of the few things he can always keep down when he’s travelling. Jared thinks it’s really just the pickled ginger that helps him, but whatever works. 

“Are we really going to pivot to psionic education?” Jared asks him, sitting next to him on the converted bed. “Or was that just something you told Gavin to throw him off?”

“It’s kind of the only plan I’ve got, so…yeah.”

“I didn’t mean it was a bad idea.”

“Is it, though?”

Jared puts his arm around him. “No. I think you’re right. This is how you change the future.”


	9. the bronze horseman

> Gentlemen,  
>  Monica has informed me that her sally to PPLOS _Siddhartha_ was successful; therefore, I shall assume that at the present, you need little more from Raviga. Little more, that is, other than time for recovery. You may stay at my vacation house if you wish; attached please find the address and the relevant codes for the security service. In two weeks, we will resume the process of Ahriman’s acquisition of Pied Piper.  
>  I am relieved that you are all alive.  
>  Laurie

Laurie Bream doesn’t take a lot of vacations, and her vacation home is nothing more than a sound real estate investment in northern Vermont. Green mountains, well isolated, not too far south, not too close to the coast, safe from floods and storms and social unrest—it must be worth a fortune. Every inch of it is designed and staged, elegantly impersonal. There’s probably a bunker underground, as Richard mutters to himself when they walk in.

But Jared loves the house. Calm, quiet, luxurious. He loves the high ceilings. the drawers that soundlessly glide open and closed, the generous and well-organised pantry (sexy, in Jared’s opinion). The air is clean. Gavin’s recorded voice on the Lumen menus is muted. Everything works, the appliances and faucets submit without an argument—even temperamental divas like the showerheads and the furnace. Jared used to dream of houses like this, back when he was living on the street.

Other than his preoccupied remark about the bunker, however, Richard doesn’t offer an opinion on the house. He submerged himself in his thoughts on the flight back to Earth, and since then he’s been quiet. Not catatonic, exactly, but taciturn, his eyes unfocused, as if the real world is a minor distraction from something complex and important he’s doing. He replies the way you would if you were busy disarming a bomb.

Jared’s been sitting on the back verandah through the supper hour, as the rosy sunset cooled to blue dusk. He’s sweating faintly in the humid air, back bare as he knots his damp shirt in his hands. Which is uncouth, but even Jared’s commitment to decorum suffers in this heat. Vermont is a steaming jungle in May, the remains of its old green forests now teeming with migrant life. Flamingos and roseate spoonbills have come up from the Deep South, pink and pale in the deep woods, fishing with the tall white egrets in the lakes. 

Jared’s loved birds ever since he was a kid. His mother used to have a bird book with beautiful illustrations, an old and out-of-date Audubon Society field guide to Montana. She would read to him every night before bed, fairy tales and Tolkien and Narnia, the Matter of Britain, Scheherazade and her thousand-and-one nights. On nights when Donald was indecisive about choosing the reading material, his mother would say, “We’ll look at the bird pictures then, until you get sleepy.”

Birding is one of Jared’s hobbies that Richard _gets_ , even if he’s not interested himself—he pretends aloofness but will listen intently if Jared wants to talk about changing migration patterns or the nesting habits of grebes. Once, early in their relationship and quite unsolicited, Richard wordlessly sent him a picture of a fat baby owl.

“Richard, did you mean to send this to me?”

“Yeah,” Richard had said, not looking up from his monitor. “He’s a fat one, huh?”

Jared was not inexperienced in the matter of wooing. He understood right away.

Perdigon doesn’t have much indigenous aerial life—small reptiles and a species that looked like a flying squirrel, but no birds. Jared’s missed them. He used to listen for bird calls with his mother, sitting on the front step with her in the evenings while she waited for her boyfriend to take her to work. 

“Listen to that sweet little bird,” she used to say. “He’s a long way from home.”

“Where is he from?”

“Mexico, or maybe from California. He’s called an Inca dove—that two-hoots call.” His mother imitated it, _coo, coo_. 

“How did he get here?”

“He flew. What, did you think he took the bus?”

Donald laughed at that, burrowing against her side. “But what did he come here _for_?”

“He came to see you, baby.” She put her arm around him. “He heard that Donald Dunn lived up here and he wanted to say hello.”

Jared’s mother never lied to him, but she did tell him stories. The truth, as she must have known, was that the birds came north driven by hunger, their old homes and habitats in ruin behind them. The Inca doves have been on the move ever since, and now Jared can hear their curt, penetrating cry even on a summer evening in Vermont. They’ve come to see him.

 

The screen door bangs as Richard comes out to find Jared on the verandah. “I slept through dinner, sorry.”

“I ordered in, so we’ve got leftovers in the fridge.” Jared starts to get up, but Richard sits down behind him, one step above, and plants his hands on Jared’s shoulders to keep him there. “Did you get some good rest?”

Richard nods, putting his arms around Jared, straddling him. “You okay?”

“I think so. I’m only sitting out here because I like hearing the birds.”

Richard listens for the birds too, resting his cheek on the back of Jared’s bare shoulder. “You know something stupid?”

“What?”

“I actually miss those goddamn frogs.”

Jared smiles. “They were good singers too. Very talented. Svelte twilight soubrettes.”

“They helped me fall asleep. The ambient sounds on the Lumen don’t have—okay, they have two settings with recordings of spring peepers, but neither of them sounds right. The pitch is wrong.”

“I’m surprised you noticed,” says Jared, stretching out his neck when he feels Richard’s lips graze briefly over his skin. “You never told me you had perfect pitch, Amadeus—”

“Yeah, it’s called absolute pitch, smartass, and no, I don’t,” says Richard. He’s playing with the drawstring of Jared’s sleep pants, distracted. “But I can still tell the pitch is wrong.” He falls silent for a few moments, then says, “I think I’ve got myself back now. Warp flights make me feel weird. Like I’m scattered in pieces all over the galaxy.”

“You were a little more preoccupied than usual, I thought, but I figured you were…” Jared has to stop to choose a word. “Looking ahead.”

“That too. I don’t know.” Richard lets out a long breath, a rush of warm air across Jared’s back. “I’m worried about this whole…big pivot thing.”

“Why, is it a bad idea?”

Richard bats the question back over the net. “Do _you_ think it is?”

“I’m not really sure. What are you hoping for? What do you want from this thing you’re trying to build?” Sometimes Jared feels like he’s intruding by asking Richard questions like this. As if he’s forgotten his place, acting beyond his station. _You should be honoured to be so close to genius,_ Donald Dunn whispers in the back of his mind. _You shouldn’t ask him questions he doesn’t want to answer._ But it’s an attitude that Jared wants to outgrow. “What do you want it to look like?”

Richard takes a breath, as if he’s about to try explaining, but cancels that with a shrug. “I dunno. I’m thinking about it. Different things, different…y’know.”

“Of course you are, but can you sketch out the rough shape of it for me? I mean, you’ve managed to make sense of your own abilities, but is that something you can _teach?_ I don’t disagree that you’re better-equipped to do it than Gavin Belson, but you’ve always struggled to explain your visions to me.”

“I always—” Richard begins, a false start, and then tries again. “Jared, look, I thought one of the best things about us as a couple is that I never _had_ to explain them to you,” he says. “Everybody else in—in the goddamn universe was trying to figure out my broken brain, analysing and parsing and measuring everything I ever said. ‘What does this mean’, ‘what does that mean’, ‘are you sure’, ‘can you quantify that?’ Everything I ever told them about myself and the way I thought—it was all up for debate. And you weren’t like that. You just…let me happen. You let me happen.”

 _Your passivity is one of your best features, Donald._ But Jared ignores the voice in his memory. “Mostly I do. But sometimes I still have questions.”

“Okay. Sorry. Okay.” But Richard’s tone isn’t sulky. He settles down again with his cheek against Jared’s back, and he tries. “It’s not that—I’m not being cagey on purpose. Well, maybe kinda. I know what I _want_ this school to be like but then…” He trails off and is quiet for a few moments, tracing a finger softly over Jared’s lean belly. 

Jared’s stomach muscles have drawn taut, even though he thinks Richard’s touching him absent-mindedly rather than flirtatiously. “But then…?”

“But then…I know that it won’t turn out that way. Not for long.” Richard takes a long breath. “What I want—you know, my parents raised me to hate private schools but it’s our only option. We need total control over program and curriculum, because we’re trying to do something totally different from normal schools. Small class sizes, training new teachers alongside the students as our population of psis gets older. The building doesn’t matter, really, not in the beginning. When universities were first being founded, they met in professors’ houses. Although—elevation _does_ matter, I know you hated it when I used the crater’s edge on Perdigon but being high up did help me. I’m not sure why yet, but I want to find out. We should find some land in the mountains someplace. Any planet will do, probably.”

Jared smiles. “Perdigon has some mountains to the north, in its habitable strip. We could probably get it cheap.”

“Wow, yes, that’s _exactly_ what I want.”

Jared laughs and turns on the steps to face Richard. “I’m only joking. But you were the one who said you missed the frogs.” He adds, “You said the school won’t measure up to the dream?”

“Right. After a few decades, in every future I see, it turns into this…” Richard makes an inarticulate gesture. “Fucking…poisonous viper’s nest. Elitist, competitive, mean. More of a deep state project or a criminal syndicate than a school.”

“Lots of places turn toxic like that, you know,” Jared says, not sure whether he’s being reassuring or not. “Maybe even most of them. A few budget cuts can turn a good institution into an authoritarian nightmare. I’ve lived in some.”

“I know you have,” says Richard. “That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to avoid. Not the budget thing. We’ll have money. Poriyot’s gonna be very happy with this deal. But trying to…make a place that won’t turn into another type of prison, another type of sweatshop. I don’t know if I know how to do that.” 

“Well—I’m not sure it’s possible,” Jared says, reaching down for Richard’s hand, where it’s pressed against his belly. “Or if that’s your responsibility. You build something for the kids now, and it’s up to them after that. Maybe they’ll carry on the way you’d like, and maybe they won’t. But it’s their choice.”

“Yeah,” Richard says softly, and it doesn’t sound like he’s entirely convinced, but his arms loosen around Jared. 

“It’s like they say—” Jared says and then stops, not sure Richard knows this story. Maybe it’s only a memory of his own. “Did I ever tell you about Shelley Berman’s son?”

“Come again?”

“I thought you knew this one already. I think about it a lot, so I thought I must’ve told you,” says Jared. “The comedian, Shelley Berman—he was from the 1960s, I think. Maybe later. He had a son who was twelve years old, studying for his bar mitzvah. The boy was diagnosed with a brain tumour. All Berman wanted was to see his son become a bar mitzvah. Well, that wasn’t _all_ he wanted, obviously, but he was fixated on it. Not for status or pride, exactly. It’s as if fulfilling this tradition, meeting this milestone will mean that he’s brought his son to completion in some way. Closure. The boy is dying, he’s so weak, but he makes it. The bar mitzvah happens in the hospital room, but it happens. And then the boy dies. Years later, in an interview, Berman tells this story. He’s choked with tears and he says, ‘I’ve been taught a terrible lesson. The future is a breaker of promises.’”

Richard splutters with laughter, as though it’s a punchline. “ _What_ —I can’t believe you never told me that. I could’ve been saying it all the time.”

“It’s not supposed to be a funny story, Richard.”

“It’s not, it’s not.” Richard puts his arms around Jared again, burying his face in Jared’s hair for a moment. “Relevant as fuck, though. The future _is_ a breaker of promises, man. That’s exactly what it is. Like, this is the kind of thing I want to do for those kids. I want to tell them that the future is a breaker of promises. And about Cleopatra’s nose, and Cúchulainn ignoring the omens, and Handsome Lake seeing the end of the world, and the rabbis saying _all this beauty which is sinking into the earth_ , and Perdigon the troubadour running away to hide in the Silvabela monastery, and Margot in the vineyard. The Pied Piper and the magpies. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never understand all the things other people have told me until I tell them to someone else. Does that make any sense at all?”

“It does to me,” says Jared, drawing him in closer for a kiss. He always says that, even when Richard isn’t exactly making _sense_ , as such. Because at least it’s an answer. It’s better to hear Richard’s confusion and doubt than his silence. Jared likes being trusted. “I hear you.”

 

Poriyot’s corporate headquarters are in Russia; the company was founded in Haifa and changed hands a few times, moving from city to city, country to country, changing its name and then returning to the old, dividing like cells. 

The driverless limo takes Jared and Richard to St. Petersburg from the airport, driving through flat, autumnal country full of solar fields and windmills. The Cyrillic billboards give Jared a giddy feeling that always comes over him when he’s travelling overseas: _I finally got away, I escaped, I did it…_

Not that it’s a great place to be, really. The visa form has an uncomfortably detailed questionnaire about race, and the outskirts of the city are ragged and poor. Cops have roadblocks every few miles, like in Middle America, checking documents and searching for weapons and holding up traffic. Richard is so nervous he’s practically vibrating, but pays no attention whatsoever to the police; Jared concludes that this means they won’t be arrested today, so he tries to stay calm. The limo rolls through tent cities and an abandoned spacefield where stacked shipping containers are serving the people in place of apartments. Jared tries not to think about what an earthquake would do to this place, or the falling wreckage of a cargoliner. 

The city itself is still beautiful, though, graceful yet austere. They’re meeting Poriyot’s CEO in a literal palace, now a luxury hotel. Close to St. Isaac's golden dome, the Admiralty spire, the bronze horseman. The ornate Empire-style building is painted a buttery yellow, with white columns and a pair of splendid Medici lions at the entrance. Richard, however, is in no condition to appreciate them.

“I’m gonna hurl,” he keeps muttering to himself as they wait for the elevator. “Gonna hurl, gonna hurl…”

“Do you want more of those ginger chews?” Jared asks, unzipping his briefcase. “Or would you rather the pills—”

“Sure, both, why not.” Richard’s rubbing his clammy palms on his trouser legs, antsy. “I don’t think the ginger does anything. It’s not even medicine, it’s a _flavouring._ Christ, I can’t do this, I’m gonna fuck it up, I’m gonna say something wrong and—and Moscovici won’t want to work with us anymore, and then—”

“Try the ginger anyway,” Jared tells him, dispensing a few of the little pastilles. “Or I have the lavender ones for anxiety, but let’s tackle the nausea first. I hate to see you in distress but the pills do dull your sparkle a bit, when the dosage is too high.”

Richard is still talking. “And in twenty years when the patent runs out we won’t have done _anything_ helpful for this new generation of psis and they’ll be cannon-fodder, Jared, they’ll be—”

“Richard, take a deep breath for me, okay?” says Jared. The elevator doors open. Another small, mirrored chamber, like the one on the Hooli station. “Is this something that’s actually going to happen or are you just afraid?”

Richard gets on the elevator, bracing himself in the corner, eyes closed. “Both. Maybe. I don’t know, Jared, I’m so—so _sick_ of having to do this. Manipulating, controlling. I don’t want to micromanage reality. That sounds so stupid but it’s true. It’s like being really aware of your tongue. Some things _should_ be out of our control, if it means we get to give our goddamn brains a break once in a while.”

Jared takes this to mean that Richard is, in fact, simply afraid. “Well, once this deal is secure then we _can_ relax, right? Then our plans will be settled and all that’s left to do is build the place. And you love to build things.”

Richard smiles, a quick flicker, and looks back up at Jared. “Yeah, I do.”

The elevator doors open. The corridors, marble and gold, feel sinfully luxurious to Jared. Literally sinful: his awe of the place is tinged with disgust, thinking about those tent cities outside of town. Gavin’s penthouse used to make him feel the same way. All he can do is hope it isn’t history repeating.

 

Richard is sweating. Like a pig, like a horse, like a nun in a cucumber patch. Damp all down the back of his shirt, ass sweat, ball sweat, flop sweat. Precipitation like this sometimes means a seizure’s on its way, but that’s a cold sweat. This one’s hot. He’s nervous, that’s all. He hates meeting people. He hates people. He hates the universe. He hates existing—

“ _Zdravstvuyte_ ,” says Poriyot’s CEO, Anton Moscovici, as he opens the door. The coincidence of the name had made Gilfoyle laugh, his rusty chuckle. _It’s a sign of the Beast’s favour. Can’t argue with destiny, Dick._ “Mr. Dunn, Mr. Hendricks, come in, welcome. You can leave your shoes, slippers are right here. Please. Would you like coffee, tea?”

Richard has been practicing with Hooli Translate, but _zdravstvuyte_ is.an intimidating thicket of consonants. Pick an easier synonym. “ _Spasibo_ —um, I mean _privyet_ , sorry—”

“You don’t have to do that,” Moscovici interrupts, with pity.

“—I would love some coffee. Actually. Thank you.” _Joke’s on you, I’m just as incoherent in English,_ Richard thinks. “We really appreciate you taking the time to meet with us, Mr. Moscovici.”

“Not at all.” Moscovici has a hoarse voice and a thick accent. He’s Gavin’s age, probably, but with less hair. Plump in a compact, tightly-contained way, with olive skin and a fussy mustache that makes Richard think of a cartoon Italian chef on a pizza box. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way, but for me life has been hectic. And please, you must call me Anton.”

“Well, we had some carbon credits saved up, so we were happy to make the trip,” says Jared, sitting down gingerly on the elegant sofa. “We’re not so jaded that we don’t get a thrill out of travel. And pitching to you is even more exciting.”

“Of course.” Moscovici is bent over the hotel’s coffee-maker, reading the instructions on the screen. “Gavin Belson treated you with his customary civility and compassion, I noticed.”

“He told me that you guys have some kind of bad history,” says Richard, twisting a napkin in his hands. “Not that—I’m not trying to poke into your business or anything—”

“Oh, I don’t think we need to delve too deeply into the past,” says Moscovici. He plugs the coffee pods into the machine and sits down on the other sofa, across from Richard and Jared. “We’re here to talk about the future, are we not?”

“Right. Okay. Yes.” Richard appreciates it when guys like this get straight to the point, but it does throw his rehearsed small talk off its rhythm. “Gavin’s planning a Hooli genetic program. We have some tech that could cut him off at the knees. But we need a biotech company to partner with.”

“What sort of tech?”

“I have a gene isolated that creates a predisposition to developing psionic abilities. Like mine. Not necessarily the same—” Richard says, stumbling, because he sees Moscovici’s pupils dilate and suffers a sudden drop in confidence. “A lot of different abilities are linked to this gene, precognition’s the tip of the iceberg. I think that’s probably down to epigenetic factors—”

“You’re not a geneticist, though,” says Moscovici. He’s poker-faced, his hands resting folded loosely in his lap, but he’s paying close attention now. “Where is this research from?”

“It hasn’t been done yet.” Richard wants to take Jared’s hand for support, but he also doesn’t want to look like he needs support. “Gavin’s team discovers it two years from now. Or you can have it right now—I’ve watched them go through trial after trial in the future, I can describe every step of the successful process. The patent application’s already complete.”

The coffee-maker beeps, and Moscovici gets up to pour. “Interesting,” is all he says.

“You must be sceptical,” Jared says, reaching out to smooth a hand over Richard’s shoulder, while Moscovici’s back is turned. “We do have some literature to back us up, if you’d like to know more.”

“I’ll read it. _If_ it’s possible, what you say,” says Moscovici, “What would you like us to do with it?”

“Poriyot does fertility solutions. Genetic screening, embryo selection, therapeutic and reproductive cloning, all that stuff—your clients could choose to have kids with these abilities.” Richard fumbles with the napkin as he takes the proffered coffee cup from Moscovici. “Their own kids, I mean. Most of the same DNA, but with a copy of this gene. There are side effects, but it’s still an edge. Rich parents want their kids to have an edge, right?”

“Mm.” Moscovici doesn’t sit back down right away, wandering to the window. “What side effects?”

Richard rhymes them off. “Seizures, hemiplegic migraine, digestion issues, disorders of movement and coordination…”

“Similar to the issues with your implant technology, then. Consumers won’t be happy about that.”

Richard shakes his head. “Lower incidence and severity.”.

Jared tries to make this sound more persuasive. “Yes, in fact, Richard himself has improved a lot since the removal of the implant prototype. Compared to the potential advantages, we think the side effects are very manageable. With the right patient education and support, of course.”

Moscovici shrugs slightly, his back to them as he looks out the window onto the treetops of the Aleksandrovskiy Garden across the street. “And what does Pied Piper want in return, if we were to go forward with a deal?”

“We want it to be a—a condition of—if parents use this process on their children, they have to send the kids to us for training.” Richard’s embarrassed by his own stutter, the dead-air pauses where he reaches for more words and can’t find them. The back of his neck is hot. “Not forever, obviously. A program for, for support and education.” Jared already used the same words. Fuck. “I mean, psi abilities are hard to deal with. These kids are going to need to be around adults who understand what they’re going through.”

“Understandable. Is that all you want?”

“We’d also like to negotiate some funding from Poriyot to build this school,” Jared says, rescuing Richard. “Ahriman will be funding most of the physical site, and some of the operating costs, but…schools are very expensive to run. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. But it’s all part of making sure the next generation has the tools they need to succeed.”

Moscovici was quiet for a few moments, while Richard tried to keep his hands still and prayed for death. The older man finally let a breath out. “Why?”

“Why?”

“Pied Piper’s technology had its issues, but it was very promising. You’re talking about throwing that away and going into…psychic education? Why?”

“Because one way or another, this type of genetic engineering is _going_ to happen. It just is,” Richard says wearily. “In the future I’ve seen, people like me spend their lives in a sensory-control pod the size of a coffin. Okay? Also known as a ‘distraction-free working environment.’ Drugged to keep calm, drowning in consumer debt, working for a corporation. Eighteen hours a day, predicting tiny fluctuations of the market, spying on users, manipulating their lives in the tiniest, shittiest ways. Counteracting the other psis who work for the competition. You don’t talk to your co-workers, you don’t talk to anyone, your boss is an app that tracks your productivity. You earn a pittance every day and it all goes into the black hole of your debt, and you never get free. You never leave the trading floor. Your mind makes you too valuable to have any control over your own life.”

“And you’d rather come to me?” says Moscovici, turning aside from the window to look back over his shoulder at Richard and Jared. “You’d rather make these abilities…a status symbol for rich parents?”

Richard does not, in fact, like the sound of that. But he doesn’t see a way around it. “What I _want_ is some—some goddamn leverage, okay? So that these kids will have a sense of, of ownership over their own brains. Let them learn, let them discover, let them have their own dreams. In the future I see, this school is infamous. Notorious. It opens doors. High-level training for specialists, the protection of a guild.” Tech guys hate union talk, in Richard’s experience, but sometimes they like guilds. Exclusivity. Appeals to vanity. Whatever will work. “Employers who want to hire psis will have no choice but to negotiate fairly with them.”

“This is very ambitious.” A few spy-drones buzz past the window, and Moscovici presses the button to draw the blinds. “You have no real proof that you can do any of this.”

“Listen, I’ll—listen. I’ll give Poriyot a limited license to use this genetic process,” Richard says, desperate. “If it doesn’t work, you don’t owe me anything. If it _does_ work, if children are brought to term and exhibit psionic abilities—then I want to train them. And Gavin Belson gets shut out of the whole racket. Right? Come on. That’s a good deal for Poriyot.”

Moscovici comes back to sit down across from Richard and Jared. “Maybe it is. Our lawyers will talk about it. And talk, and talk. Palaver, good English word. But for me—my interest in all this is very personal. I remarried two years ago. We struggle to conceive.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Jared says right away, while Richard is still wondering if he’s supposed to say something. Jared is always quick off the mark with things like this.

“My wife and I have been discussing our options, talking about genes,” says Moscovici. “She has breast cancer in her family, I have Tay–Sachs in mine, so we want to be careful. But you want to give your child as many gifts as you can. You want to leave them weapons and treasures.” He picks up his own coffee cup, wrinkling his nose in distaste at the plastic stir-stick. “Is your gift really an advantage, Mr. Hendricks? Has it made you happy?”

“Um—” Richard wasn’t expecting that question, and for a moment he’s not sure he can answer. Is he happy? If he’s honest with himself, he’s not sure. Work has been a frustrating, repetitive maze of failure. Over and over, he’s had to double back on his plans and change direction at the last second, from the ill-fated music app to the finicky technical problems of the implant to the crash of the _Handsome Lake._ Richard’s abilities have always promised riches and fame, but never quite within his reach. 

But his visions also led him to Jared. They let him save twelve kids from certain death. Twelve instead of zero. 

“It doesn’t—I don’t know,” Richard says, deciding to forge ahead. He might as well talk. He might as well try to explain, for the sake of everyone who needs to hear it. “I don’t really know what it’s like to be normal. Sometimes I wish I was. And I don’t want to say that the seizures and the headaches are all worth it compared to—look, ‘worth it’ is bullshit, okay? Pain is pain, it’s an uncountable noun. You can’t argue yourself out of pain. You can’t compare it. You definitely can’t decide how much of it somebody else should be able to handle. So…so I don’t like this question. But still, there’s something beautiful about seeing the world this way. Not beautiful,” he corrects himself. “Not always. But amazing, even so.”

Moscovici is listening intently, watching Richard with a level gaze. He glances away only to take in Jared’s expression as well, and then says, “Richard. Yes or no. Should I give this gift to my own child, to my son or my daughter? If it can be given at all?”

“I don’t—”

“You’re cautious, I respect that,” says Moscovici, raising a hand. “But you need to be able to answer this question. To do what you’re planning, you need to know the answer. Even if you’re not sure, you must wager. Place your bets. Yes or no?”

Richard can still say no, and the timelines will fracture. Gavin will have his way. But even if there were nothing at all riding on this question, Richard finds that he does know the real answer. “Yes,” he says, letting his weight drop back against the sofa cushions. “It’s the next goddamn frontier of human consciousness, okay? It’s my life’s work, and it’s fucking miserable sometimes, but _yes_ , this is important. And it’s exciting for the kids who get to forge a path through it. It’s a privilege. It’s terrifying. You should do it. You should give that to them.”

Moscovici sets down his coffee cup. “And if I do,” he says, “you will teach them? I need to think of the long term, you see. For me, this can’t be a scheme or a stratagem, an idea for you to pick up when it’s convenient and jettison when it’s not. You can’t back out of this later and say it’s just business. This isn’t business. This is a promise.”

“What happened to—letting our lawyers palaver?” Richard says, not in the mood to lower his expectations any further. “You want _me_ to promise, what about you? You want my personal lifelong loyalty to _your_ kid, seriously? Then this school gets anything it asks for from you, funding-wise. Anything. Every budget, every year, approved without question.”

Moscovici stares at him in silence for a second, calculating. “Our lawyers will discuss,” he says again, and even Richard can tell it’s a small capitulation. “But I think we can afford to be generous.”

Richard shrugs. “Then I think we can help you.”

“So. You agree?” Moscovici says, looking to Jared. “We can go ahead?”

But Jared’s eyes are on Richard, and he’s smiling—that raw, edge-of-tears smile that nobody but Jared has ever given him. A look of pride. “Full steam ahead, Captain.”

It’s corny. It’s so corny. Richard has to laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Richard's garbled Russian: _spasibo_ is "thank you" and _privet_ is "hello".


	10. epilogue

"Remember the days, consider the years of ages past;  
ask your father, he will inform you;  
your elders, they will tell you."  
— Deuteronomy 32:7

_June, 2096_

They tour a few planets, looking for a building site, but in spite of his protests, Richard falls in love with Perdigon’s green highlands, several hours north of Bonaventure Crater. Having grown up in Tulsa, he’s a sucker for mountains. Here, the steep hills rise from the level plains of the marshes, ancient weatherbeaten mountains dark with vegetation, streaked with snow. To the west, Perdigon’s permanent dawn-or-twilight casts the cliffs of Hellouin Mons in rose-gold light; to the east lies the pale foam of a vast, shallow sea. Far out toward the horizon, an iceberg drifts like a ghost ship.

Poriyot cuts the cheques, as promised, and so does Dinesh. Monica and Laurie send a joint donation, earmarked for a girls’ dormitory. Richard and Jared find an architect who’s patient with their exorbitant demands. More like a military fortress than a school, most of it underground, intended to withstand heavy impacts and to blend into the local terrain. Gilfoyle’s intrigued by a new challenge and lands on Perdigon to oversee the creation of an unbeatable tech security system. Terraformers cut a space into the mountain, sheltered from the cold sea wind, and construction crews land on the nearly-empty planet to build the school.

No one wants to name it Pied Piper; even Richard admits that they’ve moved too far beyond his original music app concept. Besides, he doesn’t want the place to be particularly easy to find—at some point in the future, certain corporations and governments are going to see this school as a threat. For now, the paperwork reads Targeted Vocational Training Center (Hellouin II).

* * *

 

_December, 2102_

On the beach below Hellouin Mons, the spacefield is windy, skimming powdery snow across the tarmac. Richard’s bundled up in a parka, with a spare CO2 scrubber tucked into his scarf; this part of the planet doesn’t have swamp gases to contend with, but outdoors, the atmosphere can still leave you gasping when you walk a flight of stairs. Jared’s more sensitive to it than Richard is, and he’s got his mask up as they watch the ground crew bring the staircase up to the hatch of the _Juno_ -class that just landed.

Neither of them like to watch big landings anymore. Richard has his arm around Jared, the nylon of their coats rustling together.

Jared pulls the mask down again. “I’m smelling a lot of fumes, even through the filter, is that normal—”

“I know, I know. It’s okay,” Richard tells him. “Everything’s fine—shit, there they are…”

Anton Moscovici is climbing down the steps to the tarmac—a little more grey and bloated, tanned from some recent vacation, wife and son in tow. The wife is young and blonde, of course, with sleepy lynx eyes that look insolent, as if she knows she’s expected to play dumb and doesn’t plan to. She’s pregnant, weighed down trying to manage a set of kids’ luggage along with her own—two carryons, a suitcase with a stubborn collapsible handle, a spare coat. Jared hurries ahead to help her.

The boy is trailing behind, holding tight to the rail. Only about the age Marty was, five or six. Dark hair ruffled by the high wind, big scared brown eyes. If Richard was expecting some trace of resemblance, there is none. 

“ _Spasibo!_ ” Moscovici says with a grin, and Richard grimaces. “Richard, Jared, you’re freezing to death out here, look at you. This is my lovely wife Irina, thank you for helping her with the bags—”

“Not at all,” says Jared, loading everything onto an empty trolley. “Welcome to Perdigon, I’m sorry it’s so cold. And congratulations must be in order?”

“That’s a very risky thing to say to a lady,” Irina says comfortably, zipping her coat back up now that she’s out of the warmth of the cabin. “This is the last one, I told him. We try once more to see if we can get a girl, and then that’s enough. So we chose a girl this time, but I said the lab should skip the Hendricks process on the embryo, because somebody’s going to have to be the practical one in the family. Anyhow, you already know who this must—Lev, pay attention.”

Lev isn’t holding onto his parents; he’s standing a little apart from them, hands in his coat pockets, staring out at the sea. His head is tilted to the right and he’s bouncing up on his toes and letting himself fall again, repeating the movement as if something about it leaves him unsatisfied.

“The grav’s lighter here than the standard for ships. Not much, it’s like a two percent difference,” Richard says to Anton and Irina. “It always bugs me too, when we first land. Very…”

“Discombobulating,” Jared supplies.

“ _Lev._ ” Irina finally taps the boy on the shoulder, and he gives it up, turning back around. “Say hello. You’ve met Jared and Richard before but you were too young to remember.”

Lev gravely reaches up to shake hands with them, but says nothing.

“He does speak English,” says Irina, ruffling his hair. “He’s quiet, that’s all.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jared says, more to Lev than to Irina. “We’ll have a visit later, when you’re not shaken up from the flight. It doesn’t take too long to adjust.” To Richard, he adds, “You should save him from the small talk, I don’t think he likes it any better than you do.”

“He’s right, these guys are gonna be doing chit-chat for a million years,” Richard tells Lev. “Jared’s got your bags, so let’s start heading inside, okay? Mom and Dad will bring up the rear when they’re ready. I don’t know about you but I need to warm up.”

The complex has tunnels from the spacefield up to the building on the mountain, in order to keep out of the wind, accessible by entrance points that look like subway stations, long flights of concrete steps going underground. It’s all dead silent now, apart from a few maintenance bots cruising around looking for meltwater to mop up.

“How far is it?” Lev asks from Richard’s elbow. He does indeed speak impeccable English, with a weirdly specific middle-class London accent, probably copying a language tutor. Self-contained, a reserved little kid. Richard was nowhere near that calm, at his age. “Are we going all the way to the top?”

“Yeah, up the mountain to the main building. There’s an elevator, don’t worry,” says Richard, who has to jump up and down in front of a motion sensor to make it unlock the next set of doors. “It’s like ten minutes,” he adds, because the Bonaventure kids always groused about anything over fifteen. “And then we can sit down—you hungry? Did they feed you?”

Lev nods. “Lab beef on the flight. I didn’t want any.”

Richard hates that shipboard stuff too, lifeless hamburger casserole with its edges frizzled by the microwave. “Gotcha. You like fish?”

“No.”

“Well. Me neither. They used to eat frogs, down where Bonaventure used to be.”

“We saw the crater from orbit,” says Lev, and although he doesn’t look up or say anything more, there’s a subtle shift in the atmosphere.

Richard feels it, but at first he’s not sure what he’s feeling. It’s a feeling of being examined, but it’s benign rather than threatening, like a doctor listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Curiously intimate. The half-formed echoes of his thoughts seem loud, ringing on the concrete. It doesn’t feel strange—the strange part is realising that nobody’s ever been able to hear his thoughts before. All his life, every thought he’s ever had has been locked up in such a small space as his own skull. He’s never felt another mind like his.

He also has no idea how to defend against it, and after a few minutes he realises that the kid has been rifling through his memories completely unchecked. Filmstrip flickers of the crater, the dead monks in the abbey huddled up against the altar, the frogs in the swamp hypnotised by the flashlight. 

“So you’re not really quiet,” Richard says when he gathers his wits back together. He’s been shambling along like a zombie, and has to backtrack to find the elevator. “It’s more that—it’s that nobody else ever wants to think with you, right? You hear them thinking but they never hear you. It’s like they think things only count if you say them out loud.”

Lev pulls his attention back, relieving the pressure on Richard’s mind. “Yeah. Your head feels weird.”

“I bet.”

“They said you were the same as me. But you’re not.” Lev doesn’t sound disappointed; relieved, if anything.

“Um—well, we’re related, sort of, but we’re not the same. I can see things before they happen, I can’t get into other people’s heads. What, were you worried about meeting someone else who could do what you can?” Richard asks.

“A little.” A long pause, and then Lev elaborates. “I thought it must hurt, maybe. Because nobody likes it when I do it to them.”

“I won’t lie to you, it feels a little weird,” says Richard. “And you need to learn how to ask first, okay? We’ll work on that. But it doesn’t hurt.” They reach the elevator and he hoists Lev up high enough to reach the button. “Just once—there you go…”

They wait for the doors to open, while Lev traces lines and curves in the dirty meltwater from his boots on the floor. A bot hums over and beeps a few times, piteously, before Richard takes the boy’s hand and draws him away from the mess on the floor. “Let him clean it…”

“It never snows at home. I wish we could stay here for Christmas.”

“Nah, you’d be really bored,” says Richard, leading him onto the elevator when the doors open. “This is gonna be a quick visit and you’ll be back home for Christmas. Right in time for Santa,” he says before he remembers that Lev probably has an unusually sensitive bullshit detector. “If, um, if Santa’s what you’re into. Anyway. I wanted to meet you and see how strong you are, but we won’t start studying together until you’re older.”

“Am I strong?”

Richard doesn’t know if you’re supposed to lie to kids about this, so he tells the truth. “I think you’ll be stronger than me, when you grow up,” he says. “But that’s a long time from now. And that stuff doesn’t matter as much as you think. Sometimes you’ll probably find yourself wishing you were more like other people.”

Lev nods, as though he’s had that feeling more than once himself. “Do you?”

“Yup,” says Richard. “Talents are something you’re born with, but learning how to be normal— _that’s_ hard. That takes time. Maybe I don’t even have it figured out yet, but we’ll try. You’re not alone.” 

The elevator doors open and they get off in the main hallway of the building on Mount Hellouin, empty and illuminated only by a few emergency lights at the intersections, and the display case next to the door. The Benedictines sent their old ansible to Jared and Richard a few years ago, and here it sits—still locked up in the Perspex box. They keep it turned on, with its screen glowing faintly in the half-darkness.

The last message it received still appears on the display, with a pulsing cursor: the first words of the Rule of St. Benedict. _“Hearken, O my son, to the precepts of the master...”_

**Author's Note:**

> Hey friends, thank you for reading all this way! The response to this fic has really kept me going, and I love you all. This fic has a [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/g523utlkn7gvuk6i8v85bxo7x/playlist/7taLkEvkAAJvRO451ALzCV?si=D14PREtAQ3ex-xoJzrLr_w), if you like those. Also check out the [moodboards](https://jareddunn.tumblr.com/post/176586544346/ladollyvitam-where-are-you-going-ill-be) made by ladollyvitam!
> 
> I started this fic because...  
> (a) I love AUs, just in general, please aim them directly at my face  
> (b) I'd already developed this setting for an original roleplay game IRL, so it was fun and familiar for me while being new and different for you! That's a sweet combo and it tends to make the worldbuilding feel more effective.  
> (c) I was reading Flann O'Brien, and that put me in the mood to make some funky old postmodern, intertextual fic. Fanfic is already a meta, intertextual medium, so it's fun to amp that up by nesting stories one inside another or using short anecdotes to make a sort of collage.  
> (d) SV is about discovery, new technology, the future, labour, the fragility of a desperate scheme, the dangers of ambition and greed, the value of true loyalty, and of course, making the world a better place. Those themes all just vibe really well with sci-fi, so I tried to engage with them a bit in this fic.
> 
> Re the title: I was also reading a lot of Mark Fisher at the time, which pointed me toward Alan Garner. Melancholy socialist futurism, lots of _Black Mirror_ vibes. Fisher wrote in _The Weird and the Eerie_ , "It is said that Alan Garner's extraordinary novel _Red Shift_ (1973) was triggered by the author seeing a piece of graffiti at a railway station which read 'not really now not anymore.' ... scrawled in lipstick, beneath two lovers' names that had been chalked onto the wall. In which case, the explanation for the phrase seems—on the face of it—to be somewhat prosaic. ... [But] what does the phrase point to if not a fatal temporality? No now, not any more, not really."  
>  Also Fisher: "From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again."
> 
> Anyway! 
> 
> If you're here reading SV fic then you're clearly very cool and good and therefore more than welcome to follow me on tumblr, I'm [doctorcolubra](http://doctorcolubra.tumblr.com).


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